FERRARI TEASES SCHUMACHER TRIBUTE LIVERY FOR MONZA
Ferrari will run a special livery at the Italian Grand Prix in honour of Michael Schumacher. The team has begun teasing it with a short video on its social channels carrying the line “Home is calling”, built around images of the 1996 F310, the car Schumacher drove in his first season with the Scuderia. Ferrari has also shown Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton in new race suits for the weekend.
What the team has not done is confirm the design. Italian outlet Autoracer has reported that the SF-26 will combine red and black with gold wheels, and that it will be a modern reinterpretation rather than a copy of the original car. Ferrari follows a tradition of revealing these liveries only days before the race, so the full look should appear shortly.
2026 is 30 years since Schumacher joined Ferrari, and it is 30 years since he took his first win in red. He won three races that season, one of them the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, which is where the bond with the tifosi started.
The F310 looked different from the Ferraris that followed it, using a deeper red with a lot of black and white across the bodywork. Black dominated the front and rear wings, the area around the sidepods and the lower sections of the car, and the wheels were gold. That combination is unusual enough to be recognisable to anyone who watched that era, which is probably the point.
Monza is also 20 years since Schumacher’s final Formula 1 victory, taken there in 2006 moments before he announced his first retirement. Between those two races came the most successful period in the team’s history: five consecutive drivers’ titles from 2000 to 2004 and the large majority of his 91 career wins. He won at Monza five times, a record Hamilton has since matched.
Ferrari has raced a special livery at Monza every year since 2022, with last season’s honouring Niki Lauda. What is different this time is the subject. Schumacher has not appeared in public since suffering severe head injuries in a skiing accident in December 2013, and his family has kept his condition private ever since.
The team is expected to introduce an upgraded power unit at Monza, using one of the extra homologations granted under the FIA’s ADUO system, and has been bench-testing a redesigned turbocharger. Early talk suggested around 15 horsepower, though the team has since played down expectations.
It arrives at a weekend where Ferrari needs the result more than the ceremony. The team is second in the constructors’ championship, 87 points behind Mercedes, with one win each for Hamilton in Barcelona and Leclerc in Britain, and it is coming off a flat weekend at Zandvoort. The Italian Grand Prix runs from 4 to 6 September.
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