Enzo Ferrari

Enzo Ferrari: The Patriarch of Maranello

He never flew in an aeroplane and never used a lift, preferring cars, trains and stairs. After the manslaughter proceedings that followed the 1957 Mille Miglia his passport was confiscated, and he barely left Modena and Maranello for the rest of his life. From that small patch of Emilian ground, a man who had been rejected for a job by Fiat built the most famous name in motor racing — and the only team that has been present in the Formula One World Championship continuously since it began.

Modena, 1916

Enzo Anselmo Giuseppe Maria Ferrari was born in Modena on 18 February 1898, though his birth certificate recorded the 20th. His father Alfredo ran a metal workshop at the family home on via Paolo Ferrari, fabricating parts for the railways. His older brother was Alfredo Junior, called Dino.

In 1916 both his father and his brother died in the influenza outbreak, and at eighteen Enzo was head of the household. The family business collapsed. He served in the Italian Army's 3rd Mountain Artillery Regiment, contracted Spanish flu himself in 1918 and was discharged. He applied to Fiat and was turned down. He worked as a firefighting instructor. Everything he later became was built on that year.

Driver

He found work as a test driver for Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali in Milan and made his competitive debut in 1919 at the Parma–Poggio di Berceto hillclimb. In 1920 he joined Alfa Romeo's racing department, and in 1923 won his first Grand Prix at Ravenna. His best year was 1924, with three victories.

He was a good driver, not a great one, and his appetite for it faded as his friends died — Ugo Sivocci in 1923, Antonio Ascari in 1925. He stopped driving in the early 1930s, after 41 Grands Prix and 11 wins, around the birth of his son. He had understood something about himself: his talent was for assembling other people's talent.

The Prancing Horse

In 1929 he founded Scuderia Ferrari in Modena, effectively as Alfa Romeo's racing arm, and gathered the finest drivers in Italy — Tazio Nuvolari, Giuseppe Campari. The emblem came from the war. The fighter pilot Francesco Baracca, shot down and killed in 1918, had carried a prancing horse on his aircraft; his mother had given him a necklace bearing the symbol before his last flight. Ferrari took the horse in his memory. It first appeared on a factory Ferrari in 1947.

Alfa Romeo reabsorbed its racing operations in 1937 and dissolved the Scuderia. After falling out with Alfa's managing director Ugo Gobbato, Ferrari left in 1939 to found Auto Avio Costruzioni, bound by a contract that forbade him from racing or designing cars under his own name for four years. He built two cars for the 1940 Mille Miglia anyway.

Maranello

Wartime bombing forced the factory from Modena to Maranello. In 1947 he founded Ferrari S.p.A. to build road cars bearing his name — not because he wanted to be a car manufacturer, but because selling cars to rich men was how he financed the racing. The open-wheel debut came at Turin in 1948; the first great victory at Le Mans in 1949. Ferrari entered the inaugural Drivers' World Championship in 1950 and has never left.

Under Enzo the team won nine drivers' titles and eight constructors' titles. Alberto Ascari took the first in 1952 and repeated in 1953; then Juan Manuel Fangio in 1956, Mike Hawthorn in 1958, Phil Hill in 1961, John Surtees in 1964, Niki Lauda in 1975 and 1977, Jody Scheckter in 1979.

Guidizzolo

The cost was counted in bodies. At the 1957 Mille Miglia, near Guidizzolo, a Ferrari 335 S driven by Alfonso de Portago blew a tyre at 160 mph and went into the spectators. De Portago, his co-driver and nine onlookers were killed, five of them children. Ferrari and the tyre maker Englebert were charged with manslaughter; the prosecution was finally dismissed in 1961.

Between 1955 and 1971 eight Ferrari drivers died at the wheel. The Vatican newspaper *L'Osservatore Romano* compared him to Saturn, the god who devoured his own sons.

The Method

His management was autocratic and deliberately abrasive; he set his drivers against one another. "He thought that psychological pressure would produce better results," said Tony Brooks. Mario Andretti, who also felt it, offered the other half: Ferrari "was correct. Always correct. And that's why you had the respect." After Campari's death in 1933 and Ascari's in 1955 he kept a professional distance from his drivers, though he was close to Clay Regazzoni and above all to Gilles Villeneuve, in whom he saw Nuvolari's aggression reborn.

In 1962 the method nearly destroyed him. Sales manager Girolamo Gardini, team manager Romolo Tavoni, chief engineer Carlo Chiti and sports car chief Giotto Bizzarrini walked out in a body over Ferrari's wife's role in the firm, founding a rival marque, ATS, and taking Phil Hill and Giancarlo Baghetti with them. Ferrari's response was to promote the juniors — Mauro Forghieri, Sergio Scaglietti, Giampaolo Dallara — and hire Surtees, who won the championship in 1964. ATS folded within the year. "Our mistake," Tavoni admitted in 1998, "was to go to a lawyer... instead of openly discussing the issue with him."

Dino

He married Laura Garello in 1923. Their son Alfredo, called Dino after the brother lost in 1916, was born in 1932 and groomed to succeed him. Dino was chronically ill and died of muscular dystrophy in 1956; his father supplied him with cars and supported his engine design work from his sickbed. "His real loves in life were racing and Dino," the historian John Nikas said. Ferrari also had a second family: Piero, born in 1945 to Lina Lardi, could not be acknowledged until Laura died in 1978, divorce being illegal in Italy until 1970. Piero Lardi Ferrari is today vice chairman and owns 10 per cent of the company.

Why Enzo Is Called a Genius

Ferrari designed no engine and won no world championship as a driver. His genius, and it deserves the word, was in the assembly and provocation of engineering talent — an ability to find, direct and deliberately torment the best mechanics, designers and drivers in Italy, and to keep doing it for sixty years across every generational change in the sport. When his entire senior staff resigned in 1962 he replaced them from within with unknown juniors and won the title two years later. That is not luck.

He also solved a structural problem nobody else solved: how to fund an unprofitable racing obsession indefinitely. The road cars existed to pay for the Scuderia, and by inverting the usual logic he created a luxury brand of extraordinary durability almost as a by-product. In 1963 he walked away from $18 million from Ford rather than surrender control of the racing department; in 1969 he sold half the firm to Fiat on terms that left him complete authority over racing.

The counter-case is severe and should not be softened. His method was cruelty deployed as a management tool, and it operated in a sport that was killing men every season; eight of his own drivers died between 1955 and 1971, and the Guidizzolo crash killed nine spectators, five of them children. Some of that was the era, and some of it was his refusal to let safety concerns slow the work. Whether an appetite for risk borne largely by other people constitutes genius is a fair question. What is beyond argument is that a fatherless eighteen-year-old in wartime Modena, rejected by Fiat, ended up with the most valuable name in motorsport.

Legacy

He was made Cavaliere del Lavoro in 1952 and received the Hammarskjöld Prize (1962), the Columbus Prize (1965) and the De Gasperi Award (1987); the International Motorsports Hall of Fame and the Automotive Hall of Fame inducted him posthumously in 1994 and 2000. Shortly before the end he launched the F40, dedicated to forty years of the marque.

He died of leukaemia at Maranello on 14 August 1988, aged ninety. Fearing public unrest — McLaren had won everything that season — he asked that his death be announced only on the 16th, after a private burial. Weeks later, at Monza, Gerhard Berger and Michele Alboreto finished one-two in the Italian Grand Prix, the only race McLaren lost all year.