Beauty contest: Ferrari competition highlights greener technologies

Posing for photographs in front of the factory gates that bear the name Ferrari is a must when visiting the nearby Museo Ferrari in Maranello.
Devotion to the brand owes as much to Ferrari’s Formula One (F1) team winning 31 world titles as it does to what Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo describes as the ’beauty, tradition and longevity’ of its road cars.

Ferrari thrives on excellence, and this year it challenged the world’s design students to imagine the ’hypercar of the future’. Their response was to add a shade of green to the iconic red marque.

The Ferrari World Design Contest 2011 asked students from 50 design schools to create the Ferrari of 2025: a car that must be hyper light, hyper fast, hyper technological and hyper ecological.

’We wanted the students to try to understand the feelings and emotions of the third-millennium man and to anticipate social and technological changes that may have occurred by 2025,’ said Ferrari director of design Flavio Manzoni, whose department organised the competition. ’We asked the students to design, plan and maximise the performance of Ferrari vehicles at all levels; to create a pure hypercar that relies on the state of the art.’

More than 200 entries were submitted, and the judging panel whittled this down to seven finalist teams, including the Royal College of Art (RCA), which had three separate submissions vying for a prize.