Vittorio Jano brought to the D50 a cluster of engineering ideas that set it apart from the field. The engine was mounted off-centre within the chassis to allow a lower overall height for the car. The fuel was carried not in a single tank but in distinctive pannier-style cells mounted between the front and rear wheels on either side of the car, which improved aerodynamics and kept the fuel mass close to the car's centre of gravity, preserving handling balance as fuel burned off over the course of a race. Perhaps most significantly, the engine was used as a stressed structural member of the chassis — a concept that would become influential in Formula One engineering for years to come.
Six D50 chassis were constructed in total.
The D50 made its race debut late in the 1954 Formula One season, driven by reigning two-time World Champion Alberto Ascari. On its very first outing, Ascari took pole position and set the fastest lap of the race, demonstrating immediately that the car had exceptional potential. The debut nevertheless ended in retirement after just ten laps when the clutch failed.
The programme continued into 1955, but tragedy struck when Ascari was killed in a testing accident at Monza — not in a Lancia, but the loss devastated team morale. Facing mounting financial pressure at the same time, the Lancia family sold their controlling interest in the company, and the assets of Scuderia Lancia, including the D50 racing cars, were transferred in their entirety to Scuderia Ferrari.
Ferrari continued development of the car under their own banner, though in doing so they removed or altered several of Jano's most distinctive design innovations. The car was initially entered as the "Lancia-Ferrari D50" before the Lancia attribution was dropped entirely.
Juan Manuel Fangio drove the modified D50 to the 1956 World Championship of Drivers, giving the car its most celebrated result. Across their full competitive lifespan, D50s were entered in fourteen World Championship Formula One Grands Prix and recorded five victories.
The D50s survived into the 1957 season in heavily modified form, now designated the Ferrari 801. By this point, however, the car had been so extensively reworked that much of its original design character had been lost, and it proved largely unable to match the pace of the latest Maserati 250F. The Ferrari 801 era was brief and largely uncompetitive before Ferrari moved on to newer designs.
The Lancia D50 stands as one of the great what-might-have-beens of early Formula One. Its design philosophy — particularly the stressed-member engine and the weight-distribution thinking behind the pannier fuel tanks — was years ahead of contemporary practice. That its greatest results came after it had been substantially modified by Ferrari rather than in its original Lancia form adds a layer of complexity to how the car is remembered. Two of the original six D50 chassis survive and are displayed in Italian museums.