F1 Number Plates: The £10 Million Reg, Lewis Hamilton’s Number Plate, and Monaco
With the Monaco Grand Prix taking place this Sunday, 7th June 2026, it felt right to look at F1 history, the lore behind the biggest and best F1 number plates, and which plates the leading drivers could consider for their road cars.
The most famous F1 number plate in the UK
If you ask anyone in the private plate industry which registration carries the most mythology, the answer is immediate F1. Two characters, no date identifier, and no area code. Just F1, and it is by some distance the most expensive private number plate ever sold in the United Kingdom.
Where the F1 plate came from
The story begins not in a racing paddock but in the county records of Essex. The F1 plate was first issued on 1 January 1904, the very first day that motor vehicle registration became compulsory in the UK.
Its original owner was Percy John Sheldon, the county surveyor of Essex, who attached it to a Panhard Levassor. The plate passed through private hands before Essex County Council acquired it in 1955, and from then, it was used on a succession of civic vehicles including a Daimler and a Jaguar.
Essex County Council then held the F1 plate for 104 years before selling it in 2008 to businessman and motorsport enthusiast Afzal Khan for £440,625, a figure that remains the UK record for a private number plate to this day.
At the time of purchase the plate was assigned to a Volvo S80, which may be the least glamorous footnote in the entire history of the reg. Khan promptly transferred it to a Mercedes SLR McLaren, and later to a Bugatti Veyron, which felt considerably more appropriate.
Why the F1 plate is worth so much
What happened next is where the story gets even more remarkable. In 2013, Khan received an offer of £6 million for the F1 number plate, representing a return of roughly thirteen times his purchase price in just five years.
And he turned it down.
By 2018, the offers had climbed to £10 million, and the answer was still the same. His reasoning was straightforward, that cherished registrations don’t behave like most assets. They don’t dip with interest rates or wobble during a slow quarter. Instead, the rarest ones simply appreciate, and F1 sits at the very top of that tree.
And it’s certainly a more interesting dinner party story than an ISA.
The Myth of Lewis Hamilton’s Number Plate
In the same year Khan was writing that £440,625 cheque, a story emerged in the Formula 1 press that Lewis Hamilton had purchased a personalised number plate LEW 1S for £200,000.
Hamilton, freshly crowned world champion and already one of the most recognisable athletes on earth, was asked about it at a press conference ahead of the French Grand Prix at Magny-Cours.
His response has aged extremely well.
"I'm not stupid enough to spend a couple of hundred grand on a bloody number plate. I wouldn't spend a hundred pounds on a number plate. A number plate's a number plate. It doesn't mean nothing to me."
So, the story of Lewis Hamilton’s number plate purchase turned out to be a rumour, and Hamilton dismissed it immediately.
The quote has followed him around ever since, partly because it is so straightforwardly blunt, and partly because there is an irony in the fact that Hamilton has since become one of the most style-driven, brand-conscious athletes of his generation.
Whether his views on personalised registrations have shifted in the years since Magny-Cours, we can’t say with any certainty. What we can say is that the irony writes itself.
Image courtesy of By Jen_ross83 -, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Common
Monaco 2026: which plates should the grid be running?
The Monaco Grand Prix takes place this Sunday and it arrives at an interesting point in the 2026 season. Kimi Antonelli, 19 years old and in his first full Formula 1 season, heads to the Principality as championship leader with 131 points, 43 clear of his Mercedes teammate George Russell.
Meanwhile, Lando Norris arrives as the defending Monaco race winner, having controlled last year's race from pole position.
Charles Leclerc also races on home soil, carrying the weight of a city-state that waited a long time for him to win there, which he finally did in 2024.
Here are some private number plates the leading F1 drivers could consider putting on their road cars.
Kimi Antonelli
Antonelli is nineteen years old, leading the Formula 1 world championship, and has already won four Grands Prix in his debut season. Something like K 1 carries exactly the right energy for a driver who seems entirely comfortable at the front of the field.
Charles Leclerc
Leclerc racing in Monaco is one of the defining storylines in modern Formula 1.
The Monegasque driver finally won his home race in 2024 after years of near misses, and CL 1 as a dateless plate captures his initials and the number that matters most in the sport.
Lewis Hamilton
Given his 2008 comments, we wouldn’t dream of suggesting Hamilton spend money on a number plate.
We will simply note that LH 44 references the race number he used across all seven of his world championship winning seasons at Mercedes, and that it would look exceptional on whatever he parks near the harbour this weekend.
It also references the number plate of his dad’s Vauxhall Cavalier as a child, which was F44 HMA. This is why he uses 44 on his F1 vehicles to this day, and why LH 44 could be the perfect private reg.
And no, he does not have to buy it. We are just pointing it out.
Lando Norris
Norris is the defending Monaco winner and one of the most marketable drivers in the paddock. The natural fit would be LN 1. However, given where Norris sits in the current standings, LN 2 may be the more honest option. Although neither are currently available. Sorry Lando.
Max Verstappen
Verstappen is a four-time world champion who is currently seventh in the 2026 standings and seems characteristically unbothered by it. MV 1 covers it for him, then. Why? Because it’s simple, rare, dateless, and the kind of plate that does not need to explain itself.
George Russell
Russell has spent most of this season as the “nearly” man, sitting 43 points off the lead in a car that is capable of winning. 1 GE is the natural choice for a driver who has made clear he intends to be number one.
1 GR sold for auction in 2025 for a whopping £250,000, mind, so if George Russell shares the same views as Lewis Hamilton, he probably won’t be enquiring.
Why the F1 number plate story matters beyond the headline figures
Monaco is not just another race on the calendar. It’s the one where the sport's relationship with the finer things is most openly on display, and where the connection between high-performance cars and the culture around them feels most unguarded.
Drivers who spend most of the year in rental cars and hotel corridors spend Monaco week on yachts and at dinners, surrounded by road cars that attract crowds of their own. Private number plates fit naturally into that world.
The broader point applies well beyond Monte Carlo, because the F1 plate story isn’t just an interesting anecdote about Afzal Khan. It’s a compelling case study in what the right registration can be worth over time.
Khan paid £440,625, held his nerve when the offers came in, and by 2018 was turning down ten times that figure. That kind of appreciation is unusual even within the private plate market, but it illustrates something real about how the rarest combinations behave as long-term assets.
Most people buying a personalised number plate are not doing so as an investment strategy, and they do not need to be. But knowing that the rarest combinations hold their value, and that a two-character dateless plate bought in 2008 for less than half a million pounds has since seen offers of eight figures, puts the whole thing in a different light.
Even Lewis Hamilton might come round eventually. And if he does, we have over 73 million plates available and over four decades in the game. So, the perfect place to buy a private reg of his dreams would be right here with National Numbers.