Over the years many great companies have attempted to “connect” with India. Most of them send a mid-level executive, a PowerPoint deck, and a banner that reads “Namaste” in a font nobody approved. Ferrari, being Ferrari, sent a Formula 1 car, a triple Le Mans winner, an 840-horsepower V12 on a plinth, and twenty-five actual Ferraris that drove 1,800 kilometres across the country before anyone had even found the canapés. This is the correct way to say hello. The event is called Universo Ferrari, and it opened in New Delhi over the weekend, which means that for the first time in its history, the full Ferrari universe — Racing, Sports Cars, and Lifestyle, which is Italian for “the bit with the merchandise” that has been assembled under one roof in India. It runs until 1 November, it is open to the public.
Let’s start with the important bit, the bit that actually matters to people who care about cars rather than canapés. The Racing section contains the Scuderia Ferrari SF-26, which is this year’s Formula 1 challenger and therefore a machine designed by people who have spent more hours in wind tunnels than most of us have spent asleep. Next to it sits the 499P, winner of Le Mans three times running, which is the automotive equivalent of someone winning Wimbledon, the Masters and an Olympic gold in the same calendar year, except it happens on no sleep and with considerably more fire involved. There’s a 296 GT3 and a 296 Challenge, the latter being the first six-cylinder car in the history of Ferrari’s one-make racing series, which is the sort of sentence that would have caused outrage in 1987 and is now met with a respectful nod, because the world has moved on and the engine still makes a noise like the end of days.
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Then there’s something called Ferrari Hypersail, which is Ferrari’s sailing project, because apparently conquering every form of motorsport on land wasn’t sufficiently exhausting, so now they’re doing boats. I have questions. I do not currently have answers. I am told it demonstrates how Ferrari’s performance culture flows from track to road to water, which is a lovely sentence and also the kind of thing you say when you’d quite like to build a boat and needed a justification.
There’s the 849 Testarossa Spider, the 12Cilindri Spider, the Amalfi Spider, and the F80, which is currently the fastest, angriest, most technologically unreasonable thing Ferrari makes, and which looks like it was designed by someone who has recently been very cross about something. The Daytona SP3 sits alongside its own 840-horsepower V12, removed from the car entirely and displayed like a piece of sculpture, which, let’s be honest, it is. There’s a 612 Scaglietti present too, a genuine piece of history, having completed a 13,000-kilometre tour of India back in 2008 with more than fifty international journalists driving it, which is either a brilliant marketing idea or an insurance nightmare, possibly both.
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The Ferrari Classiche area quietly stages one of the more significant reunions of the entire exhibition: the F50, standing alongside the 365 GTB4 within a dedicated Ferrari Classiche display. Built in the mid-1990s as Ferrari’s 50th-anniversary flagship, the F50 remains one of the purest expressions of Formula 1 thinking ever translated onto a road-legal car, its V12 lifted almost directly from Ferrari’s grand prix programme of the era and bolted as a stressed member directly into the carbon-fibre chassis. In a hall otherwise dominated by the latest hypercars and the newest Formula 1 challenger, the F50’s presence serves as a reminder that Ferrari’s obsession with performance was never a recent invention, it is simply the same conviction, decades deep. For Indian enthusiasts who may never have seen one in metal, its inclusion in Universo Ferrari offers a rare, tangible link to a car that rarely leaves Maranello’s own archives, let alone travels 6,000 kilometres to be seen in New Delhi.
What I actually rather love, though, is the Tailor Made India project. Ferrari handed a design brief to students at the National Institute of Design and asked them to interpret the character of ten Indian cities from the likes of Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Varanasi and Goa. Ferrari’s own designers then translated those ideas into ten digital Tailor Made creations across the 12Cilindri and Purosangue. It is, essentially, young Indian creativity let loose on Italian metal, and the results are on display for everyone to argue about, which is exactly what good design should provoke.
There’s substance behind the spectacle too. Ferrari is opening two new dealerships by the end of 2026, in Chennai with the KUN Group and in Ahmedabad with Infinity Group, which tells you this isn’t a drive-by charm offensive but a long-term bet on India as a market of serious, growing enthusiasm. A charity auction during the client dinner, run with new partner Avelon Luxe, raised funds for Save the Children’s Bal Raksha Bharat programme, putting money toward education for children who will almost certainly never sit in any of these cars but deserve the chance regardless. Around a thousand students were also invited in for seminars on leadership, design, technology and entrepreneurship, which is Ferrari doing something rather un-Ferrari: thinking about people who can’t yet afford the cars, rather than only the people who can. So that’s Universo Ferrari. Equal parts museum, showroom, classroom and, somewhere at the back, I suspect, a very carefully guarded merchandise tent. Go and see it before 1 November. Take the kids. Try not to touch anything.
