Lewis Hamilton Sure Doesn’t Mind Gas Supercars Now That He’s With Ferrari

I was never a big dog person, but after being thrust into taking care of a 32-pound American Eskimo for a couple of months, little Rocky is arguably my best friend in the entire world despite his propensity to bark at anyone who isn’t Asian. People change, is what I’m saying, and nowhere is that more apparent than in seven-time Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton’s personal automotive choices.

Both of these things are true: In 2020, Hamilton said he was giving up his fleet of supercars to go electric because of climate change. In 2025, Hamilton declared that his dream is to design a modern Ferrari F40 with a stick shift.

Obviously, the main difference between 2020 and 2025—aside from the early frenzy around electrification cooling off—is the color of Hamilton’s race suit. Back then, his employer was Mercedes, and as its most famous face, he was central to the brand’s aggressive push into EVs. Today he’s with Ferrari, which means he’s free to just be One Of The Boys and point out that the world could really use another old-school manual performance machine.

Whether we like to admit it or not, the things we say and do at work are influenced by who signs our checks, at least to some degree. And when you’re as public a figure as Lewis Hamilton is and representing the world’s fifth-largest automaker by market cap, you’re effectively on the clock any time you’re in the public eye. We don’t blame Hamilton for the apparent 180 nor should anyone mistake this story as an accusation of hypocrisy. Especially when the thing he appears to be advocating for is a manual Ferrari supercar—who doesn’t want one of those? But we will maintain: Funny timing, right?

Back in 2020, Hamilton was all in on EVs. In an Instagram post showing off his then-employer’s then-new Vision EQS concept, he wrote about limiting his climate impact by minimizing travel, going vegan, and using electric cars to get around as much as possible. He even apparently stopped driving his fleet of gas-powered performance cars, opting exclusively for an electric Mercedes EQC.

Fast forward five years and a team change later, we can’t speak to his eating habits, but Lewis’ Instagram at least looks a tiny bit different. Ferrari does not produce a fully electric car—yet. He is now posing in front of F40s, and in late March, he told the press that he wanted to design a new Ferrari supercar—with a manual transmission, using the legendarily raw F40 as a baseline—called the F44. For those who don’t follow F1, Lewis races under No. 44.

That vision got one step closer to reality this week when Ferrari Chief Product Development Officer Gianmaria Fulgenzi told Australia’s carsales that the company is open to bringing back the gated manual, albeit in a limited-run Icona car (think Monza SP1, SP2, or Daytona SP3). Is a wedge-shaped, gated-six-speed F44 the next special edition in Ferrari’s pipeline? Crazier things have happened.

A return of the manual in Maranello’s “regular” series production vehicles (e.g. Roma, 296, 12Cilindri) isn’t presently on the table, though, but Ferrari also once said that it would never build an SUV, either, and look how that turned out (even though it refuses to call it an SUV).

Life is long. Opinions change. Circumstances change. People change. And if Lewis can hoon gas cars again, and I can become OK with picking up literal dog poop before I’ve even had breakfast, Ferrari can probably wrap its head around putting a clutch pedal in its next entry-level supercar. Again, crazier things have happened.

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