Stormzy has been fined £533 after being caught using his mobile phone while at the wheel of his £400,000 Ferrari — just months after receiving a nine-month driving ban for the exact same offence in a different luxury car.
The 32-year-old rapper, prosecuted under his real name Michael Ebenazer Owuo Junior, appeared at Croydon Magistrates’ Court and pleaded guilty to not having proper control of his vehicle. Magistrate Lynn Keane ordered him to pay £120 costs and a £213 victim surcharge on top of the fine, and handed him three penalty points. He has been given a month to pay the total court bill of £866.
The incident occurred at 9.25am on 10 November last year when Metropolitan Police officer PC Glen Lambert spotted Stormzy’s black Ferrari Purosangue stationary in traffic near his home in Kingston upon Thames, south-west London. In a statement to the court, PC Lambert said he noticed the driver was “distracted and no longer in proper control” of the supercar as he passed on the offside to filter through traffic. “I noticed the driver was inputting an address on his maps application on his mobile phone,” the officer said. “From what I had seen of the vehicle’s movements I was satisfied that the standard of driving had fallen below that of a driver in full, careful control of their vehicle.”
When stopped, Stormzy confirmed he had been setting a route on his maps and had only just picked up the device as the officer passed. In his written guilty plea, he said in mitigation simply: “I accept I was putting a location in the map.”
The conviction is Stormzy’s second for the same offence in the space of roughly a year. In January 2025, he was banned from driving for nine months and handed a £2,010 court bill after an off-duty police officer caught him using his phone while driving a Rolls-Royce in West Kensington. That hearing also saw him plead guilty to a second charge relating to illegally tinted windows. He had faced a separate prosecution in 2023 over a £200,000 Lamborghini Urus with front windows tinted to just 4 per cent light transmission — far below the legal requirement of 70 per cent — having previously been warned about the same vehicle.
The latest offence happened just a month after Stormzy ran out of petrol in the same Ferrari on Putney High Street, where he turned the breakdown into an impromptu fan meet-and-greet and posted a video of the incident online.
The case arrives in the context of a broader enforcement picture. Separate court documents reveal that 1,195 motorists were prosecuted in the last month alone for either failing to have proper control of their vehicles or using a mobile phone at the wheel, resulting in fines totalling almost £180,000 and 58 driving bans.
