Lewis Hamilton buys the Ferrari F40 he has chased for years

Lewis Hamilton has bought a 1987 Ferrari F40, the car he has chased for years, and drove it into this year's Italian Grand Prix weekend at Monza. The seven-time Formula 1 world champion said he has sold off most of his car collection recently, but made an exception for this one.

Ferrari built 1,315 examples of the F40 before production ended in 1991, and it was the last model Enzo Ferrari signed off before his death in 1988. Hamilton's example had sat dormant in a garage, its passenger door never opened, still under a dust cover.

A ranking of the 50 greatest Ferraris ever built put the F40 first earlier this year, ahead of every hypercar the marque has made since. Hamilton told Sky Sports Italia the previous owner had bought the F40, driven it 69 kilometers from Maranello to his home, then parked it and never started it again.

"I wanted to find the most authentic one," Hamilton said, describing the search that led him to it. "The passenger door had never been opened, you know," he said. "It just had this cover on it and all this dust."

What the recommissioning turned up

Once he had the car, Hamilton sent it to his current employer to recommission it. "These cars are works of art and incredibly rare, so when I found this one, covered in dust after being sat in a garage for over 30 years, I knew I had to bring her home," he wrote on Instagram.

"First to Maranello, where the master engineers and mechanics at the factory worked for weeks to bring her back to life," he added. The F40 they revived carries a twin-turbo V8, a fiberglass and Kevlar body, and a top speed built for headlines when it launched, specs the recommissioning had to restore after three decades idle.

Engineers found the engine marked with the number 44, the number that has carried Hamilton's livery through his entire career. The find is being read as coincidence rather than design, since Hamilton bought the car for its rarity, not its serial number.

The car behind his F44 ambition

The F40 is not just a car Hamilton wanted to own. He has said he wants to design his own Ferrari one day, calling it the F44. "Baseline of an F40, with the actual stick shift," he said last year. "That's what I'm gonna work on for the next few years."

Enzo Ferrari reworked Alfa Romeo cars into racing machines before striking out on his own, debuting the Ferrari 125 S in 1947 with a 1.5-liter V12 engine. The marque went on to win six consecutive Mille Miglia races and take victory at the 1949 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Ferrari built its reputation in Formula One, where the marque has taken a record 16 constructors' championships, the racing record behind its place among the best Italian car brands. Michael Schumacher drove Ferrari to five straight Drivers' Championships between 2000 and 2004, the last of them in the V10-powered F2004.

The red paint many Ferraris wear began as a rule rather than a house preference: pre-1960s motorsport regulations required Italian entries to race in red, and Ferrari kept the color once the rule lifted. The coachbuilder Pininfarina shaped many of the marque's designs, work still shown at the Ferrari museum and at Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi.

Ferrari now trades publicly as Ferrari N.V., headquartered in Italy, and reported $4.24 billion in revenue. Fiat had taken a 50% stake in the company back in 1969, well before the F40 arrived, funding the racing program that carried Ferrari's name through the decades since.

Our most expensive cars ranking places a private-sale Ferrari, the 1963 250 GTO, at $70 million, and the same car has fetched $48.4 million at auction, a reminder of how high values run across the marque's back catalogue. One 250 GTO owner from the UK went as far as securing a personalized "25 O" license plate to go with the car.

New Ferraris today span from the $226,570 Roma to the more than $4.2 million LaFerrari hypercar, a range that shows how wide Ferrari's pricing runs even before the classic market is factored in. Hamilton's own F40 carries no disclosed price, and neither he nor Ferrari has said what he paid for it.

Hamilton's arrival at Monza in the car comes in the same week he races there for Ferrari, the team he joined after years at Mercedes. Hamilton and Ferrari fans hope his next dream becomes reality too, a win at this weekend's Italian Grand Prix in the car's home country.