Ferrari didn’t just paint a nostalgia livery on two Formula 1 cars this week. It put a 24-year-old championship-winning chassis back on a live Grand Prix track, filled its tank with 2026-spec sustainable fuel, and asked a retired four-time champion to drive it. That’s the part of the Schumacher tribute at Monza actually worth paying attention to.
The livery is the headline, obviously. Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton will race the SF-26 this weekend in a one-off scheme inspired by the 1996 F310, the car Michael Schumacher arrived in when he left Benetton for Maranello. Red, white nose flashes, black sidepods, and BBS-style wheels with a hint of gold to match the magnesium rims Ferrari ran that season. The seven stars from Schumacher’s helmet, one for each of his world titles, show up on the nose. Race suits, gloves, overalls, even the pit crew kit get the same treatment. It’s an enormous amount of design and manufacturing effort for one weekend, and Ferrari has earned the right to spend it: this is the 30th anniversary of Schumacher’s first season in red, and the 20th anniversary of the last win he scored for the team, at the 2006 Chinese Grand Prix.
Why the F2002, and Why Vettel
None of the livery is the interesting part. The interesting part is what happens on Sunday morning, before the green flag. Sebastian Vettel, who grew up idolizing Schumacher before eventually inheriting his old seat at Ferrari himself, will drive the actual F2002 chassis on a celebratory lap of Monza. Rubens Barrichello, Schumacher’s teammate through all five of those consecutive drivers’ titles, gets his own outing in the same car the day before, fittingly enough, since he drove an F2002 to victory at Monza in 2002. Two more cars from opposite ends of Schumacher’s decade at Ferrari, the 1996 F310 and the 2006 248 F1, will sit on static display alongside it.
Worth flagging: this is a celebratory lap, not a demonstration run at competitive pace, which is the standard way Formula 1 lets historic machinery onto a live Grand Prix circuit without the tire, insurance, and track-time complications that come with pushing a 24-year-old car anywhere near its original speeds. Don’t expect Vettel extending the V10 through Parabolica. Expect a controlled, ceremonial lap that still gets Monza’s grandstands on their feet.
The Fuel Detail Everyone’s Skipping Past
Here’s the detail in Ferrari’s own release that deserves more attention than it’s gotten: the F2002 isn’t running whatever fuel it used in period. Ferrari’s F1 Clienti division will run it on Shell’s Advanced Sustainable Fuel, drawing on the same development work Shell has done for Ferrari’s 2026-spec power unit. That pairing is not trivial. It puts a naturally aspirated 3.0-liter V10 from a regulatory era with no hybrid recovery, no fuel-flow limits, and none of this season’s efficiency mandates, running on fuel built to satisfy 2026’s fully sustainable-fuel requirement. It’s a tidy demonstration of how far Formula 1’s power unit rules have moved in the two decades since that car last raced, and a useful proof-of-concept for a fuel supplier about to be judged against a completely different combustion strategy this season.
We’ve already covered the regulatory side of that shift, including the FIA’s second engine catch-up ruling, which locked in which manufacturers get to keep developing their 2026 power units and shut Red Bull out of further changes for the rest of the year.
Monza Was Always Schumacher’s Track
Schumacher’s connection to Monza runs deeper than one anniversary. He won there five times in Ferrari colors, in 1996, 1998, 2000, 2003, and 2006, bookending both the start and the end of his decade in red. The 1996 win was Ferrari’s first at its home race since 1988. The titles in between, five straight drivers’ championships from 2000 to 2004 and six consecutive constructors’ titles from 1999 to 2004, are still the benchmark every subsequent Ferrari era gets measured against, including this one.
What Ferrari Actually Needs This Weekend
Strip away the theater and Ferrari has a genuinely tricky championship weekend to navigate at its own home race. Hamilton sits third in the drivers’ standings on 183 points, Leclerc fifth on 155, and both are chasing a Mercedes lineup that arrives at Monza with its own complications. Kimi Antonelli is nursing a grid-penalty situation that looks like deliberate championship risk management, and George Russell is dealing with a related engine-penalty problem of his own. Ferrari doesn’t get to just enjoy the nostalgia. A strong result at Monza, in front of the tifosi, on the anniversary weekend, is the kind of result that actually moves a season.
What to watch for: whether either Ferrari driver can turn Monza’s low-drag demands into a result that matches the occasion, and whether Vettel’s lap in the F2002 gets more crowd noise than anything either current driver does in qualifying. Practice runs Thursday into Friday, qualifying Saturday, race Sunday. The F310 and the 248 F1 will just be watching from the paddock.
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