Yes, this is the Ferrari of the future

This is it, the winner of Ferrari’s ‘Top Design School Challenge’. It’s called the Manifesto, and it is supposed to embody how the Ferrari of the year 2040 will look.

Of course, it’s not real in any way. It’s not even full size. Yet though it’s actually quite small, it represents a big victory for the six design students in charge of its design.

Some context, then. Late last year, Maranello set the world’s top design institutes a challenge: to imagine what a Ferrari supercar could look like in 25 years’ time. If that sounds like a long way off, it’s over 20 years since we first saw the Ferrari 355.

After whittling down 50 entries from the first round down to eight schools, the competition then went down to three models each from four different institutes. That’s twelve.

From there, a winner – that’s Manifesto – was chosen as the overall ‘Gran Premio’ winner, selected by a jury consisting of such Ferrari luminaries as Sebastian Vettel, Paolo Pininfarina, Nick Mason, Jay Kay and Flavio Manzoni.

The judges were apparently won over by the ‘completeness’ of the design, as well as their ability to build a complete vision of the car across the exterior, cabin and running gear. They also loved the doors quite a bit.

The panel also wanted to make special mention of the FL, which focused purely on FutureFerrari’s interior, saying the Russian design student had rethought the ‘human-machine interface’.

There was another winner too – the ‘Premio Speciale’, awarded via an online vote cast through Ferrari’s Facebook page. That award went to de Esfera.

So, have a click through the gallery, and get ready for a very interesting future...