Hamilton & the F40:
The Story Behind the Most Iconic Photos of 2025–2026

January 20, 2025. Lewis Hamilton walks through the gates of Maranello for the first time as a Ferrari driver. Seven world championships. Thirteen years at Mercedes. 105 Grand Prix victories. And he chose to mark the moment not beside the SF-25 — the machine he would spend the season fighting to master — but beside a car from 1987. The Ferrari F40. The most visceral, uncompromising supercar the Prancing Horse ever put its name to.

The Lewis Hamilton Ferrari F40 pairing has since appeared twice in fourteen months, in two completely different contexts, and produced two of the most talked-about images in recent motorsport history. This is the full story behind both of them.

Day One. Maranello.

The scene was set at Fiorano, on the small square named after Michael Schumacher — the only other seven-time world champion in Formula 1 history. Behind Hamilton, visible in every official photograph: the white walls and red windows of Enzo Ferrari's office, untouched since the Commendatore left it for the last time in 1988.

Hamilton arrived dressed unlike any racing driver before him at Maranello. Dark double-breasted suit. Long overcoat worn over the shoulders like a cape. The Italian press called it eleganza assoluta. Team principal Frédéric Vasseur, CEO Benedetto Vigna, and Piero Ferrari — son of Enzo and vice-chairman of the company his father built — were all present.

The Black F40 Ferrari Refused

Here is the detail that got buried in the noise of the announcement. For the official photograph — his very first image as a Ferrari driver — Hamilton had one request. He wanted the F40 in black.

Ferrari said no.

The refusal reveals everything about both parties. Hamilton — fashion icon, boundary-pusher — saw the F40 as a canvas. Ferrari saw it as a symbol. Symbols have rules. The F40 exists in one colour. It has always existed in one colour: Rosso Corsa. The racing red Enzo Ferrari chose to represent Italy on every circuit in the world. To repaint it black for a photograph would have been, in Ferrari's eyes, a rewrite of history.

So the car stayed red. Hamilton wore black. And the contrast they resisted turned out to be the point — the image became one of the most recognised in recent motorsport history precisely because of the tension between them.

Tokyo Drift. Vol. III.

Fifteen months after Maranello, Hamilton was back behind the wheel of an F40. Different city. Entirely different energy.

For the 2026 Japanese Grand Prix, Hamilton returned to Tokyo for the third instalment of his annual Tokyo Drift video series — shot with Larry Chen, one of the most respected automotive photographers alive at larrychenphotos.com, alongside his regular collaborator 13thwitness.

The F40 was flanked by a Nissan Skyline R34 dressed as Brian O'Conner's car from 2 Fast 2 Furious — silver, blue stripes, neon underglow — and a VeilSide Mazda RX-7, the exact model made iconic by Han in Tokyo Drift. The casting was deliberate. The whole evening was a love letter to two cultures Hamilton belongs to simultaneously: Formula 1 and the underground world of car meets.

He burned donuts at Daikoku — the legendary parking area under the Yokohama motorway interchange where Japan's finest JDM builds gather on weekend nights. If you want to understand that world, start with our guide to the world's greatest supercar tuners. A Ferrari F40 doing donuts at Daikoku is cultural sacrilege and the perfect collision of two worlds, simultaneously.

The Passenger Nobody Expected

The video had been running for nearly a minute. Donuts. Drifts. The F40 sliding through rain-slicked Tokyo streets, exhaust note bouncing off concrete walls. Then, in the final seconds, the camera moved toward the passenger window.

Kim Kardashian. Laughing. Riding shotgun in a Ferrari F40 at Daikoku. The two had been linked for months — spotted together in Europe, then at the 2026 Super Bowl — but neither had confirmed anything publicly.

Larry Chen's Instagram post had originally included still photographs from the shoot featuring Kardashian alongside Hamilton and the car. Those slides were quietly deleted within hours. The video itself, however, kept the reveal: a deliberate zoom, her face filling the frame before cutting to black.

The relationship was confirmed not through a magazine cover or a red carpet. It was confirmed at midnight, in a parking lot in Yokohama, in the passenger seat of a car with four million dollars of bodywork wrapped in tyre smoke.

Why Always the F40

Hamilton has been explicit about this for years: the F40 is his all-time favourite supercar. Not the LaFerrari he owned. Not the Enzo. The F40 — a car that could not be more different from the one he drives for a living.

It makes complete sense when you understand what Hamilton values. The F40 is the precise opposite of modern Formula 1. No algorithms. No hybrid recovery systems. No traction control to catch your mistakes. Raw power, zero safety nets, and complete driver accountability. On a wet road, the F40 will remind you — immediately and without apology — that you are the weakest link in the system.

Hamilton has owned at least three Ferraris: a 599 GTO, a 599 SA Aperta, and a LaFerrari. Never an F40. Which may be exactly why he keeps being photographed with other people's. The car he loves most is the one he hasn't kept.

There is also the historical weight. The F40 was the last Ferrari personally approved by Enzo Ferrari. His final statement — a car that answered the question of what Ferrari would build if it ignored everything except going fast. For a driver who has spent his career rewriting records inside the most regulated sport on earth, there is something deeply appealing about a machine with no rules at all.

At Maranello in January 2025, the F40 was a symbol — Ferrari's history welcoming its most audacious bet. At Daikoku in April 2026, it was something else: a playground, a stage, a front-row seat to whatever Lewis Hamilton's life has become.

Ferrari said no to the black car. They were right. Some things shouldn't change.

The obsession is real.