The Leica Q3 43 Formula 1 Edition: Vroom Vroom

In 1961, Phil Hill became the first American to win the Formula 1 World Championship. He drove for Ferrari, he was fast, and he was famous. He also carried a Leica M3 with a 50mm lens almost everywhere he went.

The pictures he made with it are the reason the camera and this article exist.

Phil Hill shot his friends with his camera: Mechanics leaning on a fender. Drivers killing time before a session. Crowds, hotel rooms, pit lanes, everything.  

He had the best kind of access – he and his Leica were a part of the scene. 

Sixty-some years later, Leica has built a camera that invites us all to the race track with our Leica. It’s called the Q3 43 Formula 1 Edition, and it costs $9,950, and it has a fixed 43mm lens. Most people picture a racing camera as a 400mm telephoto on a monopod. This is not that. 

This is a camera that’s a part of the scene.

Here’s the story.

What Leica Built

Let’s start with the materials.

The camera body is the same one you’d find on a standard Q3 43. Leica put the carbon fiber where your hands go. There’s a carbon handgrip with wireless charging built in, a carbon thumb rest, and a carbon soft-release button. All made and tested in Germany, according to Leica.

The body itself is wrapped in Microvelour, a suede-like synthetic that Leica says is modeled on the covering of a racing steering wheel. Red accents on the controls finish the look.  

Sounds like a fast camera. 

Why 43mm?

The lens is Leica’s APO-Summicron 43mm f/2 ASPH. Eleven elements in eight groups, seven aspherical surfaces. 

APO means apochromatic, a correction that brings three colors of light to the same focal plane instead of two. In practice that means color fringing on high-contrast edges is a nonfactor.  

DPReview‘s testing of the standard Q3 43 found the lens almost free of chromatic aberration, and Amateur Photographer singled it out for environmental portraits, street work, and family pictures.

Behind that lens sits a 60.3-megapixel full-frame sensor.

The reason 43mm feels so natural is geometry. The diagonal of a full-frame sensor measures about 43.3mm, so a 43mm lens is “normal” in the optical sense. No wide-angle stretch, no telephoto compression.  

On a 28mm lens, like the one on the regular Q3, it puts the whole scene like a garage into the frame. A 43mm isolates a subject like one mechanic with the car behind him.

A fixed 43 won’t become a telephoto with cropping – but the 60 megapixels does help with framing.  

• A 60mm crop leaves about 31MP
• A 75mm crop leaves about 20MP
• A 90mm crop leaves about 14MP
• A 120mm crop leaves about 8MP
• A 150mm crop leaves about 5MP

The camera saves a cropped JPEG and keeps the full raw file with crop data, which is a nice touch.  

But a 150mm crop is a 5-megapixel picture of a distant car. If your idea of racing photography is a car filling the frame at 200 miles an hour, this is the wrong tool.

A few other specs to know while at the track. The central shutter runs to 1/2000 second mechanically and 1/16000 electronically, with flash sync all the way to 1/2000.  

The lens is stabilized.

Macro mode focuses down to about 26.5cm at roughly quarter life size, which can get you some nice close ups. 

The viewfinder is 5.76 million dots at up to 120fps.

Burst shooting tops out at 15fps, with a hitch. Leica’s technical-data PDF says per-frame AF works at 7fps. The F1 badge doesn’t change anything about autofocus.

The Formula 1 Look

Every special edition needs something you can’t buy elsewhere, and in this case it’s software. The Formula 1 Look is a rendering profile delivered through the Leica FOTOS app, and it’s exclusive to this edition.

Here’s what Leica has said: The Look transfers to the camera and applies at capture, with a live preview in the viewfinder. It affects JPEGs, and the DNG raw files stay untouched.  

Leica describes it as higher contrast and richer saturation.

Leica hasn’t published tone curves, color transforms, or any description beyond “more contrast, more saturation.”  

Leica’s existing Vivid Look is already described as enhanced saturation with strong contrast, and Eternal adds a magenta tint on top. On paper, the F1 Look sounds like a cross of those two profiles Q users already have.

A few more questions worth asking. Is the Look tied to the camera’s serial number, the app account, or both? Can a second owner restore it after a factory reset?  Does it work in video?  

Leica’s firmware notes say downloaded Looks have fewer adjustment options than the built-in ones, and that Looks switch off whenever Video Gamma is set to anything but Off.

Will Anyone Carry It To A Race?

Yes.  

Circuit of the Americas allows personal cameras and bans tripods, monopods, and detachable telephoto lenses. 

Las Vegas in 2025 defined “professional” cameras by detachable lenses and banned camera accessories outright. Would the carbon grip count? Better ask before bringing it in. 

The Price, And The Collector Question

The standard Q3 43 lists at $7,950 in the US. The F1 edition lists at $9,950. That’s a $2,000 premium, about 25%, and it buys the carbon grip, the thumb rest, the soft release, the Microvelour, the Look, and the presentation box. 

Leica’s standard aluminum thumb rest and wireless grip run $245 and $235 on their own, so part of the premium is accessories you might have bought anyway.

Leica hasn’t announced a production number. That’s the single most important thing a collector needs to know, and it’s missing. “Special edition” is accurate. “Only X will exist” is unsupported until Leica says otherwise.

The used market for recent special-edition Q cameras tells a mixed story. The 2021 Daniel Craig x Greg Williams Q2 launched at $6,995 in a run of 750, and a used one recently listed at a dealer for $4,850. A Q2 “Dawn” by Seal went unsold at auction this June with a starting price far below its estimate. Meanwhile a 007 prototype, one of seven, sold for over 14,000 euros.  

Our advice is buy this camera because you’ll use it and have fun that you’re now a part of the Leica F1 ownership team. 

A Camera For The People Around The Cars

Phil Hill could have photographed anything he wanted with that M3. He chose a normal lens and pointed it at his friends.

Whether the F1 edition is worth $2,000 over the standard Q3 43 comes down to how much you want your camera to feel like a race car.  

Sources

• Leica Camera and Formula 1 announce licensing partnership, Leica press release
• Formula 1 and Leica Camera unveil the Leica Q3 43 Formula 1 Edition, Formula 1
• Leica Q3 43 technical data, Leica Camera
• Leica Q3 firmware downloads and release notes, Leica Camera
• Leica Q3 43 review, Amateur Photographer
• Special-edition Formula 1 Leica Q3 43 news, Amateur Photographer
• Leica Q3 43 review, DPReview
• Inside Track: inside Phil Hill’s racing world, Revs Institute
• Venue Policies, Circuit of the Americas
• Leica Q2 Daniel Craig x Greg Williams, pre-owned listing, Leica Classic Store
• Leica Q2 007 Edition prototype P006/007, Leitz Auction