Flavio Manzoni Is Designing Ferrari’s Future: One Radical Line at a Time

Inside the visionary mind of Ferrari’s Chief Design Officer

In a cultural moment obsessed with nostalgia, where fashion resurrects past silhouettes, music revives decades, and design recycles trends, Ferrari’s Chief Design Officer, Flavio Manzoni, stands firmly, defiantly, in the beauty between the dance of past and future.

For Manzoni, progress is not found by repeating the past. It is found through a conversation with it — a tension, a dialogue — but never an imitation.

“The duty is to never forget the past, but never be a slave of it,” says Flavio Manzoni, who has led Ferrari’s design vision for the last 15 years. “People expect a new interpretation of a form of the past. But for me, design means innovation, not a repetition of something that already exists.”

This belief is at the core of Ferrari’s newest supercar: the 849 Testarossa, the successor to the SF90 Stradale, and the most radical embodiment yet of Manzoni’s design agenda. Not a nod to heritage, but a leap into what Ferrari could be.

When Manzoni began work on the 849 Testarossa, he wasn’t looking to refine the SF90. He was looking to transcend it.

“We wanted to make a step ahead in terms of radical design approach,” he explains. “The SF90 Stradale was still a little bit like a berlinetta, not too extreme or not extreme enough. With this new design, we wanted to give a clear message: This is a supercar.”