'A little lust for a lot of precision. A little elegance for a lot of intent': The changing face of Ferrari design

Here’s a good quiz question: In what year did Ferrari fully design and build its first car?

Ferrari S.p.A was founded in 1947, so that would seem a logical guess, but it is the wrong one. It was, in fact, 2013. Until just 13 years ago, all the styling and panel beating was outsourced to other companies, predominantly Pininfarina (which has, over the course of almost 100 years, also designed cars for Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Fiat, Peugeot, Honda, Hyundai, Volvo and General Motors). Ferrari’s finished aluminium coachwork was trucked the 180 miles from Turin to Maranello, where Ferrari’s engineers welded it to their rolling chassis. The bodies were essentially the icing on the cake.

Occasionally, projects were outsourced to the likes of Bertone, Ghia and Carrozzeria Touring, with the latter crafting the very first Ferrari, 1947’s 125 S. But it was Pininfarina that established the Ferrari ‘look’. It designed and built the exteriors of more than 100 distinct production and concept Ferrari models, starting with 1951’s 212 Inter and ending with 2012’s F12 Berlinetta. These are stunningly handsome bookends. Then everything changed. Ferraris, from this point, would be conceived and born entirely on the premises.

In 2013, Ferrari unveiled the LaFerrari, a 950bhp hybrid hypercar. Despite the slightly silly name, it looked deadly serious. There was little in the way of romance or whimsy in its aesthetics. It was attractive, but it was engineering-led. The design had been directed by Flavio Manzoni, an urbane Sicilian architect employed in-house by Ferrari since January 2010, who established the Centro Stile (styling centre) in the heart of Ferrari’s Maranello complex. Now aesthetics are dictated at ground zero, and form and function are indistinguishable.

‘Everything starts with a dream and looking into the future,’ Manzoni explains. ‘It’s essential to consider how the product will be perceived in 50 years. If there is no innovation, there is only style. The car needs connecting to its technical soul.’ And this is where Ferrari’s post-2013 philosophy comes in. Styling is now inseparable from the technological demands, such as aerodynamics, cooling, packaging and structural rigidity. Some of Ferraris’ recent front-engined designs, in particular the 2019 Monza SP, the 2020 Roma and its successor, the 2025 Amalfi, take a softer approach, but most modern Ferraris are led by raw performance. This is particularly true of its latest hybrid machinery; the £3.1 million 1,183bhp limited-edition F80 and the £408,000 1,036bhp 849 Testarossa.

Both cars have thoroughbred DNA. The F80 is the latest in a bloodline of Formula 1-inspired hypercars that started with the iconic 288 GTO and F40 in the 1980s. The 849 Testarossa is the first to be given the ‘redhead’ moniker since the model that came to define 1980s excess. The decade of shoulder pads, Filofaxes and Phil Collins is clearly back in fashion. Yet neither of these cars is a throwback.

Manzoni and his team have succeeded in reimagining and reinterpreting Ferrari’s heritage while avoiding nostalgic repetition. Timelessness is a fundamental element in the design of a Ferrari. The necessity of creating an enduring masterpiece has been recognised by Ferrari-appointed designers universally over the years, overcoming challenges to create objects of eternal beauty, outlasting changing trends and evolving tastes. ‘Retro has been a trend for 25 years, but every new product needs to belong to its time,’ says Manzoni. ‘Design is the best messenger to a world that is superior to the natural one.’

Ferrari’s design language represents a delicate balance between form and function, devoid of decoration for decoration’s sake. Beauty never comes at the expense of performance. Yet surely no other industrial company is responsible for so much beauty. Each Prancing Horse seems designed to excel on every plane, without compromise. Manzoni likes to quote the sculptor Brancusi, that simplicity for him is ‘complexity resolved’. The author J. G. Ballard once wrote of how, in the future, driving will be restricted to private parks under psychiatric supervision. Manzoni is more reassuring: ‘These cars are a symbiosis of man and machine, and of hedonistic pleasure. That pleasure will never stop.’

I have this ringing in my ears as I punch the starter button on the 849 Testarossa and head out onto the Circuito Monteblanco near Seville. The ride, grip and feel engages every sinew. And it’s relentless. The ‘80s Testarossa never actually drove particularly well. The lift-off oversteer made it a widow maker and it wasn’t quick by today’s standards – a new Range Rover would eat it for breakfast. The 2026 Testarossa is ferociously fast: 0-60mph takes under 2.3 seconds and doesn’t let up till the needle passes 205. It has a bewilderingly complicated suspension system which uses 6D sensors to read every input and direct torque expertly. Most of the time it’s rear-wheel-drive, but when needed it’ll power the fronts too. The all-new braking system uses something called ‘anti-jerk’, which might disqualify the lion’s share of Ferrari’s customers.

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The 849 Testarossa. The styling is similar to that of many modern Ferraris, such as the 12Cilindri and the F80.

Back in the pitlane, I drink in the design. There’s not a cheese-grater in sight. The spirit of attention-seeking is alive and well, but everything about this car is rooted about 15 minutes into the future. It shares some facial characteristics with its big brother, the F80, namely the black bonnet band. This Zoro mask disguises the headlights; a 2026 take on the previous models’ pop-up lamps. The rear haunches have hints of another seven-figure modern Fezza, the SP3 Daytona. The twin-tail winglets at the back have echoes of the marque’s 1970s Le Mans-smashing 512 sports prototypes, which is really this car’s only retro nod, and is more directly linked to the much more recent and extreme FXX-K — a LaFerrari-based machine that deliberately sounds like it’s banned from pre-watershed broadcast.

Elsewhere are details never seen before, and which could only have come about in-house. The 849’s deeply scalloped doors required a new forming process to make, and act as a chute to feed the intercooler with air. Those intakes are highlighted by a vertical black element that looks like a No.1 and divides the visual volume. The design has a Lego quality. I had my reservations when I first saw renderings, but in the flesh I’m won over. Certainly, it’s the most extroverted cavallino we’ve seen in years. It’s so brash you might confuse it with a Lamborghini. The 849’s immediate predecessor, the SF90, was quite nerdy and inelegant – a rare misstep by the House of Manzoni. Contrastingly, its replacement is a jock in catwalk couture.

Inside, it’s less lairy but retains a strong sense of occasion. A curved loop runs from the dashboard down to the central armrest, which delineates the driver and passenger zones and gives it an airy architectural quality. The transmission selection pad, rendered in brushed aluminium with three levers, apes the famous manual H-gate which Ferrari discontinued in 2012.

I was sad to see the H-gate go, but Ferrari recognised as early as 1997’s F355 F1 that the future of supercar transmissions was paddle-shaped. The 599 GTB and California were the last cars fitted with stick-shifts. With much faster and efficient technology available, it would have been anathema for Ferrari to continue down that path. It is not afraid to break from the past.

This is true of external design. Ferrari designs speed, and whatever shape emerges is the car. Firstly, there is a coherence from the Ferrari range which we didn’t see when design was farmed out. There’s a shared visual DNA, from the thin lighting signatures to the sculpted airflow, that ties everything together. Secondly, there’s the performance, which has jumped forward from where we were a decade ago. This is enabled by the designers sitting in the same building as the aerodynamicists and engineers. The F80 and the 849 Testarossa’s numbers are as outrageous as the shapes. Thirdly, Ferrari now has total creative freedom and control. It can pivot instantly, experiment wildly, and pursue ideas that could have been diluted in collaboration.

But there is a cost. When you prioritise purity, you sometimes lose something less measurable: elegance. Spend five minutes on the internet and you’ll find thousands of Ferraristi arguing with a passion normally reserved for VAR decisions. Some love the aggression and futurism. Others long for the clean, sensual lines of the Pininfarina era. Which is sexier is subjective.

The thing is, when everything has function there’s less room for flourish. And Ferrari, historically, traded as much on this as it did on pace, certainly where road cars were concerned. To resurrect the Testarossa name in the era of the Centro Stile is to invite risky comparison. And yet, that is precisely what Ferrari has done. It doesn’t try to mimic the past. It barely nods at it. Instead, it asks a more difficult question: What would a Testarossa look like if it had never existed until now? The answer is a car that feels less like a reinterpretation, and more like a parallel universe.

Ferrari has traded a little lust for a lot of precision. A little elegance for a lot of intent. The 849 Testarossa and F80 may not be universally adored, but they are defiantly modern Ferraris, and that’s exactly what the firm set out to make.

What’s coming next, though, is a departure. The company hasn’t completely closed the curtains on collaboration. It has sought the input of Silicon Valley’s most pivotal product designers. It has given LoveFrom — the design collective founded by Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson — complete creative freedom to design its first all-electric car.

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The Ferrari Luce is the company's first electric car, and has divided critics and owners alike.

The Ferrari Luce is unlike any Ferrari you’ve seen before. This is set to be the most influential car the firm has ever made, and its most controversial. Ive changed the world with the iPhone. Might he and Newson change the automotive landscape with this clean, tactile, but strangely suburban Ferrari?

‘We worked hand-in-glove with Ferrari, and I think it’s safe to say we exploited each other’s resources to the max,’ says Newson. ‘It’s been very, very important for us as designers to have been given the opportunity to work on every aspect of this project: The user interface, the interior and the exterior. We started this collaboration about seven years ago. Jony and I own Ferraris, including old Ferraris, so in a way we already had a longstanding relationship with Ferrari. Interestingly, even though they have a huge amount of in-house experience, they identified very early on that the time had come to experiment. To try and solve problems in a new way, with fresh eyes.’ Ferrari has spoken of a cross-fertilisation of ideas.

The Luce is disruptive yet coherent. Is it a red-blooded Ferrari, though? The performance says yes, but it needs to look fast, sexy and elegant, not just today, but 80 years down the line. I’m not sure it fulfils these parameters. The Ferrari brand is so strong, graphically, reputationally and financially, that the Luce will not damage it. But it will go down as an oddity.

I respect the management’s bravery, however. ‘Ferrari Luce is not a response to change,’ says Ferrari chairman John Elkann. ‘It’s a deliberate decision to lead what comes next, with clarity and purpose. What would Ferrari be if we imagined it with a blank sheet? Not just new ideas, but a different perspective. That is why we chose to work with LoveFrom; not to confirm what we already know, but to challenge it. To look at Ferrari from the outside, and to look at what it can become next. Luce is a car of the future, and uniquely Ferrari. It reaffirms what has always defined this company: The courage to redefine the limits of [what’s] possible.’