Fernando Alonso has long since conceded the championship fight to Lewis Hamilton, but the duel between the two old rivals is very much alive in another arena: the supercar arms race.
Hamilton, now deep into his Mercedes era and heading for Ferrari, recently turned Monza into his own private concours d’elegance. Away from the stopwatch, he rolled into his team’s home race in a pristine Ferrari F40, a car so coveted it barely needs an introduction. This particular example, with mileage so low it might as well still smell of the factory, carries an engine block number Hamilton says matches his famous No.44.
In the rarefied world of F40s, that detail only adds to the mystique. The going rate for one of Maranello’s icons hovers around £3 million, but the auction record now touches £6m. Hamilton’s car sits somewhere in that stratosphere, an asset as much as a passion project, and it stole plenty of attention in the Monza paddock.
Alonso, predictably, has not stayed quiet.
Alonso answers with a mirror-finish monster
While Hamilton’s F40 basked under the Italian sun, Alonso chose a different stage and a different kind of spectacle. The Aston Martin driver has been filmed and photographed gliding through the streets of Monaco in a Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse being billed as the most expensive Veyron ever built.
Even in a principality where excess is the norm, this one stops traffic.
Built in 2014, the car’s bodywork uses an extraordinary 20 tonnes of polished aluminium, finished to a mirror-like sheen. Under daylight, it doesn’t just reflect the surroundings; it almost disappears into them, a rolling chrome phantom threading through the same streets Alonso attacks once a year on Grand Prix weekend.
Beneath that dazzling skin lies the familiar savagery that made the Veyron a landmark car. When it arrived in 2005, it tore up the rulebook, becoming the fastest production car on the planet with a top speed of 407 km/h. The numbers remain outrageous: an 8.0‑litre W16 engine, quad-turbocharged, delivering the kind of thrust that rewrote what a road car could be.
According to AutoNext, Alonso’s example had just 750 km on the clock with its previous owner and sat on the market for 27 months before changing hands. That patience has been rewarded with a buyer whose name matches the car’s theatre.
A private battle of multimillion-pound garages
Publicly, the record sale price for a Veyron stands at around £2m. Alonso’s ultra-rare, mirror-finish Grand Sport Vitesse, with its condition and specification, is expected to push beyond that, planting it firmly in the same financial postcode as Hamilton’s F40.
This is not Alonso’s first foray into automotive exotica. The 45-year-old already counts an Aston Martin Valkyrie among his toys, a hypercar that blurs the line between F1 technology and road legality. He also owns a one-off Pagani Zonda Roadster Diamante Verde, a car as flamboyant as its name suggests.
Hamilton and Alonso now occupy very different parts of the F1 grid, but their off-track collections tell a similar story: two champions, two eras, still measuring themselves against each other in carbon fibre, aluminium and eye-watering price tags.
The titles are settled. The garages, clearly, are not.
