Ferrari Reveals Hypersail Livery at Milan Design Week as Launch Approaches
Milan's famed Salone del Mobile, the long-running trade show for high-concept (mostly-)interior design, got a boost this week with the full livery reveal of Ferrari's Hypersail project, a 30-metre (100-foot) foiling racing yacht nearing completion at an undisclosed location in Italy. The event confirmed that the launch remains on schedule for later this year.
Build photos released alongside the livery announcement confirm construction is progressing, with the yacht described as close to ready for its launch and a subsequent sea-trial phase. The precise location and timing of the launch have not been specified.
The design: from Maranello to the ocean
Hypersail is a full-carbon monohull designed by French naval architect Guillaume Verdier — best known for his work on America's Cup campaigns and successive Vendée Globe challengers: working alongside Ferrari's own tech team led by Matteo Lanzavecchia (head of vehicle engineering at Ferrari and CTO of the Hypersail project) and Marco Guglielmo Ribigini. The Ferrari Design Studio, headed by chief design officer Flavio Manzoni, handled exterior styling in close coordination with the engineering team throughout.
The brief was explicit: no element of the yacht's aesthetic could be resolved independently of its function. Every surface, curve, and volume had to emerge from the aerodynamic, hydrodynamic, and structural requirements of an offshore foiling monohull. The result is a silhouette that draws deliberately from Ferrari's automotive lineage — the tapered proportions of the Monza SP1/SP2 are visible in the profile, and the coachroof architecture echoes the Ferrari 499P Hypercar that took Ferrari's third consecutive Le Mans victory — without those references compromising the engineering logic.
"Hypersail represented an unexpected opportunity for the Ferrari Design Studio," said Manzoni. "A challenging objective due to its complexity, which allowed us to extend our creative research into a context different from our usual one."
The livery: Giallo Fly and Grigio Hypersail
The colour story announced at Milan Design Week is the most direct expression of Ferrari's brand identity applied to the project. The dominant material is the carbon fibre hull itself, rendered in a new shade called Grigio Hypersail — a grey developed specifically for this project to reflect both the material's character and its performance connotations. Against it, Nuovo Giallo Fly (a specific shade of yellow that carries significant narrative weight within Ferrari's history) is applied to the cabin, foils, and hull lines.
The yellow's origin is particular. It traces to Fiamma Breschi, a friend of Enzo Ferrari and the widow of racing driver Luigi Musso, who was known for his yellow helmet. Her influence led to the first yellow Ferrari (a 275 GTB) establishing a shade that Ferrari considers its "second soul" alongside Rosso Corsa. The livery draws the colour separation directly from the Ferrari 512 BB (Berlinetta Boxer) of the 1970s, one of the first examples of what Ferrari describes as an "integrated" livery approach, where the transition between colour zones is determined by the vehicle's form rather than applied over it.
The engineering underneath
Hypersail will be the first vessel of its size to operate entirely on renewable energy, with no combustion engine aboard. The power required to run the foil control systems, the canting keel, the rudder, and the full suite of onboard computers and instruments must be generated autonomously under sail: from solar panels integrated into the deck and hull sides, wind, and kinetic energy recovered from the yacht's own motion.
The solar panel integration is itself a technical solution. Position was determined through advanced solar-exposure modelling; the panels are walkable, with a specific grip surface, technical fastening, and treatments to allow normal crew movement across them.
The foiling system uses an innovative canting keel as the support point for one of the yacht's foils, a configuration new to monohulls of this scale, with the remaining contact points provided by a foil on the rudder and alternating lateral foils. At speed, the hull rises almost entirely clear of the water. The stability system draws on Ferrari's automotive simulation and vehicle dynamics expertise, translated into an active flight control architecture designed for offshore conditions rather than the short-duration match racing for which current America's Cup foilers are optimised.
"Hypersail is a vessel unique in scale and technology, engineered to deliver peak performance within an environment as singular and unpredictable as the ocean," said Lanzavecchia. "The strategic choice of a monohull arises from the synergy between maximum hydrodynamic and aerodynamic efficiency. Throughout every design phase, the collaboration with the Design Studio allowed us to accentuate and refine Hypersail's forms and features."
The project has generated fifteen patents (nine filed, six in preparation) and has been described by Ferrari as a two-way technology transfer platform, with developments from Hypersail intended to feed back into future Ferrari road car and motorsport programmes.
Team and context
The Milan reveal came without Giovanni Soldini, who was announced as team principal when the project was first revealed in 2024 and had been central to its public profile. Il Sole 24 Ore reports that Soldini separated from the project in recent weeks. Enrico Voltolini has taken over as team leader; Lanzavecchia and Ribigini continue to lead the technical programme.
Ferrari Chairman John Elkann has previously been explicit that Hypersail is not oriented toward the America's Cup: "this boat is thought to go beyond rules," he said at the project's announcement, positioning it instead as an offshore endurance platform with ambitions toward ocean crossings and round-the-world racing.
While Ferrari's not aiming for the world's oldest regatta trophy, they can see which way the wind's blowing, so to speak: research into hydrofoiling technology has enjoyed a massive increase in investment during the past several years, and with proven leaps in speed and efficiency, widespread adoption is almost certainly on the horizon... but it may be the first time an international luxury brand has so publicly planted a stake in this particular vision of the future.
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