The most stylish man in Formula One walks into the executive dining room at the Ferrari headquarters in Maranello near Modena. It is a horrible day in northern Italy, with the rain pouring off the roof at the factory where the most glamorous sports cars in the world are lovingly put together.

Dressed in an elegant blue suit, blue shirt, polka-dot blue tie and immaculate black brogues, the Marquis Luca Cordero di Montezemolo oozes charm as he explains that he is sorry he is late for lunch but he was stuck in Milan and his helicopter pilot did not want to fly with the cloud base on the ground. “I persuaded him eventually,” he laughs before moving round the room shaking hands and taking his place at the centre of the table.

They love and respect Di Montezemolo at Ferrari and you can see the backbones stiffen among his lieutenants, Stefano Domenicali, the team principal, among them, when he arrives. The president is here and everyone listens. There are some world champions in self-importance and long-windedness among the key players in the Formula One paddock, but Di Montezemolo is easy on the ear as he sets out his thoughts.

The man loves racing drivers. He first managed the Ferrari Formula One team in 1973 and he has worked closely with two of the best, Niki Lauda, the triple world champion, and Michael Schumacher, the seven-times champion. He knows greatness when he sees it. Of course to a British audience the key question is what he thinks of Lewis Hamilton, at 23, the youngest world champion the sport has known and a driver tipped by many to go on to rival the feats of Schumacher, whose picture has pride of place in the dining room.

In the back of many minds is the feeling that, whatever Hamilton says about staying with McLaren Mercedes for the rest of his career, he will one day work for the Prancing Horse. The financial or sporting force attracting him will eventually outweigh the force keeping him away and Hamilton will end up dressed in red overalls at the wheel of one of Di Montezemolo’s machines. The chameleon in Hamilton would have no problems adjusting. “I have always loved Ferrari and admired them and I love the food in Italy,” you can imagine him saying.

Di Montezemolo has not said much about Hamilton. The pain of losing to him still hurts for an individual whose passion for Formula One is evident from the moment he opens his mouth. But you quickly sense that the 61-year-old, who is also chairman of Fiat, sees something special in the Briton who snatched the World Championship from Felipe Massa, of Ferrari, 15 seconds after the Brazilian had crossed the finish line in the season’s final race, at Interlagos, São Paulo, last month. (Watching this at his home near Bologna, Di Montezemolo was so angry that he threw his remote control at the television, which exploded, terrifying his daughter in an adjoining room.)

Di Montezemolo starts with a joke, saying that it was just as well that a Ferrari driver lost to Hamilton this year because, had they beaten him to the world title at the last race for the second time in succession, after Kimi Raikkonen did so last year, he would be under the care of a psychiatrist by now. But he goes on to say that Hamilton deserves great praise not only for his performance this year but for that amazing rookie season when he came so close to becoming the first debut world champion.

Returning to the subject later in the lunch, he was asked by The Times whether he believes that Hamilton is destined to become one of the great drivers and whether he would like him to join Ferrari one day. “I think he is a very, very good driver,” Di Montezemolo said in his heavily accented English with a flick of his left wrist, on which, incongruously, he sports a tattoo of a tortoise. “Last year Hamilton was fantastic. He can pay a little price last year because of the pressure and his lack of experience. But I think if he will continue to drive a competitive car, he can enter the history of Formula One.

“Regarding Ferrari, of course I would like to have a driver like Hamilton, like Alonso. But that will be in another life, because in this life I have Michael, Kimi and Felipe. Maybe in two years I will tell you something different, but at the moment I am very, very happy. And don’t forget Felipe won the championship until 15 seconds to go — he won more races than Hamilton. But there is no question that Hamilton deserved to win, particularly in light of what he lost last year.”

Much as Di Montezemolo admires the Briton, he also advanced a proposition that many students of the sport would argue with and that may seem incompatible with his predictions for Hamilton’s ultimate standing, namely that Hamilton and Massa are as good as each other. But when he said this, and he said it twice, he qualified it each time by making clear that the comparison is good only for this year. “Massa is as good as Hamilton this year; it is difficult to say more or less,” he said.

Praise indeed, then, for Hamilton from a Formula One veteran. There are plenty of ifs and buts in Di Montezemolo’s comments to keep the speculators in business, even if Hamilton proves correct in his prediction that he will never leave the authoritarian strictures of McLaren. In the meantime Di Montezemolo is aware that there are critics of Ferrari who feel that Raikkonen has lost his edge and is now on a permanent downward trend. The businessman who says that “Formula One is my life” believes differently and predicts that “the Iceman” will come back fighting in 2009.

“Kimi is like a centre forward who hasn’t scored a goal,” he said. “So he needs to score one goal and start again. We have spoken recently. I think he is very, very determined and until Brazil he was the champion of the world and he achieved that in the first year after Michael. He will be back, for sure. Kimi is strong, determined and very, very good.”

Italian's jobs

- Aristocrat businessman worth $400 million (about £250 million)

- Law graduate who joined Fiat and then Ferrari as Enzo Ferrari’s assistant.

- Managed entry of Italian yacht in 1982 America’s Cup and was manager of the committee that put on the 1990 football World Cup in Italy.

- In 1991, Gianni Agnelli, the Fiat chairman, made him president of Ferrari, which had struggled since Enzo Ferrari’s death in 1988.