Ferrari has never built a sailing yacht. That has just changed. At the company's shipyard in Pisa, the hull of a roughly 30-metre (100-foot) foiling ocean racer has come out of its mould — the first physical milestone of a project Ferrari calls Hypersail. The brand best known for Formula 1 and road cars is heading offshore, and it wants the boat to fly.
A monohull built to fly
Most foiling boats this size are catamarans or trimarans. Hypersail is a single hull, and that is the hard part. The design rests on three points of support in flight: a canting keel that swings to one side and carries a foil, a foil on the rudder, and lateral foils on the hull. Together they are meant to lift a 30-metre monohull clear of the water and keep it there.
"We've never seen a monohull of this size that can fly and also stay in the water for this long," says Matteo Lanzavecchia, Ferrari's head of vehicle engineering and the project's chief technical officer. He does not hide how far out the team is reaching. "This three-point foiling design is very new — and very complex."
The hull itself took more than a year to build. It is a composite sandwich — an outer skin over foam and honeycomb, wrapped in carbon-fibre laminates — cured slowly and then lifted from its mould in May.
Power without a drop of fuel
Hypersail carries no combustion engine. Every watt it uses is generated on board while sailing: solar panels set into the deck and along the hull sides, wind, and kinetic recovery from the boat's own motion. The energy is stored in a high-voltage battery derived from the hybrid systems in the LaFerrari and SF90 road cars — automotive technology moved straight onto the water.
The reasoning is partly practical. "A regular fuel combustion engine for a similarly sized sailing yacht burns more than 2,000 litres of fuel during a five-day transatlantic race," says project team leader Marco Guglielmo Ribigini. Hypersail is designed to cross the same water on nothing but what it harvests as it goes.
Automotive DNA
The boat looks like a Ferrari on purpose. Its low silhouette echoes the Monza SP1 and SP2 speedsters, the coachroof borrows from the 499P Le Mans Hypercar, and the livery pairs a heritage racing yellow — Nuovo Giallo Fly, a nod to 1950s driver Luigi Musso — with a carbon grey the company calls Grigio Hypersail.
"Hypersail represented an unexpected opportunity for the Ferrari Design Studio," says chief design officer Flavio Manzoni. The engineering is just as proprietary: Ferrari has filed nine patents on the project and is drafting six more.
The people behind it
The naval architecture is by Guillaume Verdier, the Frenchman behind America's Cup foilers and record-setting ocean racers. The sailing programme is led by Giovanni Soldini, a two-time solo round-the-world skipper with more than 40 transoceanic crossings behind him. Lanzavecchia runs the engineering, Ribigini leads the project team, and Manzoni's studio shapes the design. The coatings come from Boero Yachting.
It is an unusual mix: a Formula 1 engineering culture pointed at offshore sailing. And Ferrari is building the boat itself, rather than handing the work to an outside yard.
What happens next
The livery was revealed in April at Milan Design Week, the hull came out of its mould in May, and the launch from Pisa is set for no earlier than September 2026. Sea trials follow, and the long-term goal is open-ocean speed — transatlantic records and the like.
Ferrari is careful to frame the boat as a test bed, not a product. "This is an experimental project," Ribigini says. "If we meet our expectations either in terms of speed, stability or sustainability, we'll be happy."
Photo: courtesy of Ferrari.
