When Luca di Montezemolo, the man who spent two decades rebuilding Ferrari into the most mythologised automobile brand on earth, saw the Luce — the company’s first EV — this week, he said: “If I were to say what I truly think, I would damage Ferrari. We risk the destruction of a myth.”
Then he said what he truly thought anyway.
“I hope they remove the prancing horse from that car,” the former Ferrari president said about the five-seater, £477,000 EV developed with the help of famed iPhone designer Jony Ive.
Italy’s transport minister Matteo Salvini posted on social media that the Luce “looks anything but a Prancing Horse car. Is this supposed to be ‘innovation’? Who knows what Enzo Ferrari would say”?
Opposition lawmaker Carlo Calenda, who worked at Ferrari for five years, called it “an aesthetic and technological insult to those who love Ferrari or, as in my case, worked in it.”
“Congratulations to [Ferrari chairman John] Elkann who, after having half-destroyed or alienated Marelli, Comau, Iveco, Fiat, Alfa, Maserati, Lancia, Scuderia Ferrari, Juventus, Repubblica and La Stampa, is now trying with Ferrari. And it wasn’t easy.”
Ferrari’s shares fell more than eight per cent on the day of the unveiling earlier this week.
Di Montezemolo is not a fan of the new Ferrari Luce
None of these critics said the Luce was a bad piece of engineering, though. With 772kW, a 0-60mph time of 2.5 seconds and a 330 mile range, its performance figures are eye-popping.
The objection is something else entirely, and it is the same objection that has trailed Formula 1 for most of the hybrid era and particularly this year: this thing is technically impressive, but emotionally wrong.
The parallel is almost uncomfortably precise.
Since 2014, Formula 1’s hybrid power units have been the most sophisticated racing engines ever built, a genuine triumph of engineering at the absolute limit.
And since 2014, a significant portion of the sport’s most devoted audience has felt nagging unease about what the sport has become. The noise shrank. The mechanical drama softened. The terminology got harder to follow.
Fans who once stood at the barriers with their chests vibrating were now watching something that, to borrow Salvini’s phrase, looks like anything but what they fell in love with.
The 2026 regulations have pushed the electrical contribution further still, to a 50-50 split between internal combustion and electrical power.
The cars are fast, the racing is often compelling, and the engineers are doing astonishing work, but the discourse around the sport is still thick with a particular kind of anxious nostalgia — the same anxiety Ferrari has just triggered on a global scale with one car launch.
What Formula 1 can learn from the Luce backlash is not that electrification is always wrong, or that audiences simply resist change.
Ferrari has navigated identity crises before.
The Luce looks nothing like a Ferrari
Ferrari
When Enzo Ferrari first considered a more affordable, higher-volume V6 sports car in the 1960s, he reportedly refused to badge it as a Ferrari at all. He didn’t want any car without a V12 engine to carry the Maranello factory’s name.
The car was sold as a Dino and advertised as “Almost a Ferrari.”
Enzo Ferrari understood, intuitively, that the prancing horse carried a specific promise, and that not every product could bear that promise without diluting it.
The Luce’s problem is not what it is. It is what it was called, and how it was presented.
Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna responded to the backlash by urging critics to respect the evolution of automotive technology.
“All of us, all the companies, have an important responsibility in front of the world that we have to respect,” said Vigna. “We are in a period of technology transition. I think that we have to explore all the avenues possible of high efficiency.”
His response frames the argument as being between progress and reaction, between the future and the past, when, in fact, it isn’t. It is between a product and the mythology it claims to represent.
Formula 1 has made the same rhetorical error repeatedly.
F1 is debating the future of its engines
Grand Prix Photo
When challenged on the noise, on the complexity, on the hybrid formula, the sport’s instinct has been to explain, to point at lap times and development costs and efficiency figures and say: this is still the pinnacle.
But fans are not measuring it against a specification. They are measuring it against a feeling they had at their first race, or the first time they heard a V10 at full chat, or the first time a driver managed something on a wet lap that seemed physically impossible.
You can’t satisfy that with a press release.
It doesn’t mean Formula 1 was wrong to electrify any more than Ferrari was wrong to build an EV. The economics of manufacturer involvement demand it, and manufacturers are the lifeblood of the sport.
But it does mean the sport, and brands like Ferrari, have a responsibility to manage the emotional contract it holds with its most devoted audience, not by reversing course, but by building bridges and not treating nostalgia as ignorance.
The Luce will probably find buyers. Ferrari is targeting Silicon Valley and China, markets where the prancing horse has cultural weight but not the same visceral attachment to combustion.
The car will sell to people who want a Ferrari without any of the things that traditionally made Ferrari Ferrari.
There is a word for what happens when platforms stop serving the people who made them great. Should Formula 1 learn it?
By
Pablo Elizalde
Formula 1, similarly, is growing fastest in markets where the history means little and the spectacle means everything.
But Ferrari hasn’t left Maranello. It hasn’t stopped making V12s. And Formula 1 has not abandoned the fans who filled its grandstands before Drive to Survive was a concept.
The challenge for both is to hold two audiences simultaneously – to evolve without making the oldest and most passionate constituency feel that what they loved has been quietly retired, badged up as something new, and presented to them as an act of respect for progress.
Di Montezemolo built the Ferrari that some people are mourning this week, and it’s why his words carry weight.
F1’s equivalent figures – the people and brands who built Formula 1’s mythology across the different eras – feel the same way.
As Formula 1 bosses continue to debate the future shape of the sport – and a potential decrease in electrification as early as next year – this week’s backlash against Ferrari is a timely reminder that striking the right balance between living up to the mythology and keeping up with technology is harder than it looks, and far more punishing when you get it wrong.
