Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton: The Supercar Rivalry

Fernando Alonso has long since accepted that Lewis Hamilton will finish their careers with more world titles. That particular race is run. Away from the track, though, the old rivalry still crackles — and this time it’s playing out in carbon fibre, polished aluminium and eye-watering price tags.

Hamilton recently rolled into Monza with a showstopper: a pristine, ultra-low-mileage Ferrari F40. The car, which he says carries an engine block number matching his famous No.44, turned the paddock into an impromptu concours. With average examples of the F40 hovering around £3 million and a recent auction record of £6m, it was a statement as loud as any pole lap.

Alonso, typically, chose a different stage.

Alonso’s mirror-finish monster

While Hamilton’s F40 basked in the flashbulbs at Monza, Alonso was filmed and photographed gliding through the streets of Monaco in something even more outrageous: a Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse that is being billed as the most expensive Veyron ever built.

The car, produced in 2014, wears bodywork finished using 20 tonnes of polished aluminium, worked to a mirror-like sheen. Under the harsh Mediterranean light, it doesn’t just reflect Monaco; it almost dissolves into it. On the same streets where Alonso wrestles an F1 car once a year, the Veyron looked like a spaceship on a reconnaissance mission.

The Veyron’s reputation needs little introduction. When it first arrived in 2005, it detonated every established benchmark, becoming the fastest production car in the world with a top speed of 407 km/h. Its party piece remains that outrageous 8.0-litre W16 quad‑turbocharged engine, a powerplant that rewrote what a road car could be.

This particular example had barely been used. According to AutoNext, the car showed just 750km on the clock under its previous owner and sat on the market for 27 months before Alonso finally swooped. Patience, in this case, bought exclusivity.

Trading blows in the supercar arms race

The numbers around Veyron sales already sit in rarefied air. The record public sale stands at around £2m, but Alonso’s unique, aluminium-clad Grand Sport Vitesse is expected to soar beyond that mark, muscling into the same financial stratosphere as Hamilton’s F40.

For Alonso, 45, it is another jewel in a garage that already reads like a fantasy draft. He owns an Aston Martin Valkyrie hypercar and a one-off Pagani Zonda Roadster Diamante Verde, machines that barely seem real when you see them in photographs, let alone parked in a pitlane.

Hamilton and Alonso may now occupy different ends of the F1 grid, yet their off-track duel continues at full throttle — two serial champions, still pushing each other, still chasing the next tenth, even when the race is measured not in lap time, but in millions.