Ferrari Mechanics Found Number 44 Stamped on Lewis Hamilton’s F40 Engine

• Hamilton drove his restored Ferrari F40 to Monza media day on September 3, 2026

• The car showed 69 km and had sat under a dust sheet for more than 30 years

• Ferrari technicians found the number 44 stamped on the engine block during recommissioning

Lewis Hamilton arrived at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza on Thursday morning driving his own Ferrari F40, a car that sat under a dust cover for more than 30 years before Ferrari’s factory technicians returned it to the road. The seven-time world champion, in his second season with Scuderia Ferrari, was in for media day ahead of the 2026 Italian Grand Prix.

The car wore a front plate reading 44, Hamilton’s racing number. What the paddock did not know until the FIA press conference that afternoon: the same number is stamped on the engine block.

69 km From Maranello, Then 30 Years Under a Cover

Hamilton told reporters he had been looking for an F40 for a while, with two conditions: low mileage and a story. Plenty had crossed the auction block in the past couple of years, he said, some with low mileage but “not particularly special, or maybe the paint’s been redone.”

The one he found had a single trip on the odometer. “The owner had bought it, drove it from Maranello to his home, 69 kilometres, and then parked it and never started it again,” Hamilton said. “The passenger door had never been opened. It just had this cover on it and all this dust.”

Here’s where the story turns. “Do you keep it as an art piece, keep it all dusty, or do you have them clean it up?” Hamilton said. The decision took him a while. He chose the restoration for one reason: he wanted to drive it.

A second thought sealed it. “I’m pretty sure none of the Ferrari drivers in history have ever arrived in the coolest cars that they have, these iconic ones, the GTO or the F40,” he said. “And I was like, ‘It has to be done.'”

Weeks in Maranello and an Engine Stamped 44

Ferrari’s factory technicians spent weeks on the car. Hamilton said the teardown turned up very little that needed replacing. “It stood the test of time. Everything was still working. Hardly anything had to be changed,” he said.

The surprise came when the engine was removed. “They found out the engine’s number 44. It’s got stamped on the engine number 44. I couldn’t believe it,” Hamilton said. “I was like, ‘Did you know? You’ve got to be lying.’ So, it feels very much like fate.”

The number dates to Hamilton’s karting years, taken from the F44 HMA plate on his father’s Vauxhall Cavalier.

Ferrari Classiche completed the work at the factory’s in-house restoration and certification workshop in Maranello.

Ferrari opened Classiche at Maranello in 2006 to restore, maintain and authenticate its older cars. It works from the company’s original drawings and build records, and it issues a certificate of authenticity to road cars more than 20 years old that still carry their original engine, gearbox, chassis and body. Matching those numbers to the factory record is the core of the process.

The One Car He Kept Wanting After Selling Everything

Hamilton confirmed a year ago that he had sold his entire car collection. Asked at the 2025 Azerbaijan Grand Prix whether he wanted a Ferrari F80, he said: “I don’t have any cars anymore. I’m more into art nowadays. If I was going to get a car, it would be the F40. But that’s a nice piece of art.”

That collection was reported to have included a McLaren F1, a Pagani Zonda 760 LH, a LaFerrari and a LaFerrari Aperta, though Hamilton never published a full list.

The F40 goes back further than any of those. “As a kid I had all these cars lined up and the red car, the F40, was the one,” Hamilton said at Monza. “But it was so far from my thoughts that I’d ever have a chance to acquire one of those.”

He added a karting-era memory. He and his father would arrive at tracks in a rented Fiat Cinquecento while Nico Rosberg, his future Mercedes teammate, turned up in a yellow Lamborghini Diablo. “To fast-forward to think today that I’m able to arrive now in this cool car, it’s really, really special,” Hamilton said.

From His First Day at Ferrari to Monza

Hamilton posed beside an F40 outside Enzo Ferrari’s house at Fiorano on his first day with the team, January 20, 2025. That car belonged to Ferrari; his own would come 19 months later. He said the image was his own concept, and so was Thursday’s: the black suit and tie, the beret and the tan overcoat over his shoulders.

“I had that idea: ‘I want to turn up in this style, in this suit, in this way,’ to pay homage to this sport, but also just get that moment because it’s never going to come again,” he said.

He announced the purchase on Instagram on August 31. “When I found this one, covered in dust after being sat in a garage for over thirty years, I knew I had to bring her home,” he wrote. The post ended with two words: “Stay tuned.”

There is a longer-term F40 project on his list too. Hamilton said in 2025 that he wants to design a Ferrari of his own, an “F44” built on the F40’s baseline with a manual gearbox.

The Ferrari F40 by the Numbers

• Engine: 2.9-litre twin-turbocharged V8
• Output: 471 hp, 426 lb-ft of torque
• Transmission: 5-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
• Dry weight: approximately 1,100 kg
• Claimed top speed: 324 km/h
• Production: 1987 to 1992, 1,311 built

For 1987, 471 hp from 2.9 litres was a serious number; Ferrari billed the F40 as the first production car to pass 320 km/h. It was unveiled that July to mark the company’s 40th anniversary and was the last new model approved by Enzo Ferrari before his death in August 1988.

Values are near record highs. The most recent public sale, a 1991 car showing 72 miles (about 116 km) from new, brought US$8,365,000 at RM Sotheby’s Monterey on August 15, 2026. Across roughly three dozen road-car sales since 2022, the median sits near US$3.2 million, and untouched low-mileage examples now clear US$5 million to US$8 million. Hamilton has not disclosed what he paid.