The movie Ferrari, which will make its debut in theaters on Christmas Day, is based upon Brock Yates book, Enzo Ferrari, published in 1991. Like the movie Ford v Ferrari, the movie is a small slice of a larger history. The book is aptly named as it covers the entirety of Enzo Ferrari’s life. During his ninety years, he was tenacious in his desire to win automobile races with cars bearing his name.
Born in February 1898, Ferrari participated in his first race in October 1919. At age twenty-two, he purchased an Alfa Romeo dealership beginning his long association with the company which fielded one of the top racing teams in Europe. He proved to be a good salesman and a shrewd negotiator.
After Alfa decided to concentrate on the Grand Prix events in 1929, Ferrari formed Scuderia Ferrari with Alfredo and Augusto Caniato and Mario Tadini to race Alfas in selected races. They had deep pockets and he had connections with some of the premier drivers. Alfa and the Scuderia would exchange cars and drivers depending upon the race. The Scuderia had access to Alfa Romeo’s best machinery and technology. When Alfa Romeo bowed to pressure from Mussolini to produce more military armament, they terminated their racing activities and put their top Alfa racing cars under tarps at the factory. The Scuderia Ferrari, using aged equipment, continued to be successful against second-tier rivals. As the 1933 season ended, tragedy struck. In the second heat of the Monza Grand Prix. Four cars crashed killing two of the top drivers including Giuseppe Campari driving for the Scuderia. This impacted Ferrari. From that point on, he would not become close to his drivers.
In four short years, Scuderia Ferrari grew from a tiny regional racing entity to the exclusive representative of a factory whose automobiles were the fastest and most powerful on the international racing scene. Predictions were that the Scuderia would dominate but it was not to be. Racing’s governing body mandated that beginning in 1934 through 1937, Grand Prix racing cars would have smaller engines. In Germany, Dr. Hans Nibel at Daimler-Benz and Ferdinand Porsche at Auto Union increased the engine power while using a light-weight chassis. While the Scuderia took the top three spots at the 1934 French Grand Prix, it was only because the cars from Germany either left the race early or ran at reduced speeds. Enzo Ferrari knew the Alfas were obsolete and wanted the financial support of the Italian government but no backing occurred. Alfa Romeo hired Wifredo Ricart to get the Alfa racing back on a par with Germany and to improve the company’s aircraft engines. In March 1937, Alfa bought 80 percent of the Scuderia Ferrari and returned control of the racing team to Alfa effectively demoting Enzo Ferrari. On New Year’s Day 1938, Alfa announced they were absorbing the Scuderia Ferrari. Enzo Ferrari received a significant payout with the purchase.
During World War II, Ferrari turned his attention to building war implements. When hostilities ended in 1945, Ferrari swore he would never again be subject to someone else’s whims and started his own company. He returned to racing, this time by constructing his own racers. Two years later, Ferrari climbed aboard a rudimentary racer. Ferrari scored his first victory at Turin and won the 1949 Italian racing championship with drivers Alberto Ascari and Luigi Villerosi after Maserati and Alfa Romeo withdrew from competition. Despite this success, the race cars were not competitive. When Alfa re-entered the championship circuit in 1950, it won all eleven of the races it entered.
While the racing activities had been somewhat disappointing, they were enough to capture the interest of the world’s elite. By the winter of 1951, seventy hand-built road cars in addition to the Formula I and Formula II cars had been made. Ferrari had also developed a strong set of sponsors who supported his racing team financially and with parts and technical support.
By the 1952 season, Ferrari’s primary competition, Alfa, was retiring its old racing cars. The only serious Formula I contender was Ferrari. The governing body for auto racing responded by declaring that the 1952 World Championship effort would be run with Formula II cars which usually participated in minor European open wheel races. This suited Enzo Ferrari just fine as his cars had dominated the Formula II races. Alberto Ascari repeated as world champion winning twenty-eight of the thirty-one races he entered.
For the 1954 season, Ferrari’s star drivers Ascari and Villoresi left for rival Lancia. Suddenly, Ferrari plunged into a twenty-four-month losing streak. By 1955, the racing program was in shambles. Needing financial and technical support, Ferrari negotiated with Gianni Lancia. At the end of a six-hour negotiation, Ferrari walked away with a deal—six Lancia D50 racers plus spare parts, tooling patterns, and plans. This deal probably would not have come together had Ascari not been killed at Monza in May 1955 after which Lancia retired from racing.
As the legend of the Ferrari racers grew, Enzo never had trouble attracting eager drivers or engineers. He would intentionally create controversies among his staff and his drivers, often playing mind games to psych them into taking chances to win. He was able to attract some of the world’s best drivers…most of which left after two or three seasons and some would later extract revenge by beating the Ferrari entries.
The Ferrari movie begins in 1957—when Enzo Ferrari was nearing sixty years old. He had dedicated nearly forty years to the crafting of racers out of his shops in Modena and later nearby Maranello, Italy. His underlying precept was that power was the key to winning.
Late in 1956, Ferrari engineer Fraschetti took a prototype V6 racer to the Modena autodrome for a day of testing, lost control of the car and died the next day. In March, Eugenio Castellotti was summoned to defend the speed record at Modena autodrome. He crashed while trying to set another record and died. Two members of the Ferrari team dead in four months. But that paled in comparison to the carnage at the Mille Miglia, the most important race in Italy, which Ferrari was determined to win. Ferrari fielded a five-car team—Mike Hawthorne, Piero Taruffi, Olivier Gendebien, Wolfgang von Trips, and Alfonso (Fon) Portago who was a last-minute replacement for Luigi Musso in possibly the most powerful car in the race. Taruffi, who had won the race 27 years before, handed the victory to Ferrari. Von Trips finished second and Gendebien third. Collins was eliminated from the race by a broken drive shaft. At the final fuel stop in Bologna, Ferrari told Portago that Gendebien, in a much slower car, was beating him. This was a mind game encouraging Portago to go faster. He had about thirty miles to go when his wheel hit a stone kilometer marker. The car spun out of control and launched into the air hitting a pole. Just like in the 1955 Le Mans disaster, the car broke into pieces. When it stopped, twelve people, including Portago, were dead and another twenty injured. Immediately, blame was placed on Ferrari who was charged with murder rather than the race organizers who allowed the crowd, estimated at 10 million, to line the nearly 1000 mile route. It took four years for the courts to drop the charges. The 1957 season ended without a victory for Scuderia Ferrari.
Auto racing was changing and Ferrari was married to his idea that pure power was the key to success. The British led the way in the development of a rear-engine racer that would dominate racing in the coming years.
The 1958 racing season continued the carnage from the previous year. Ferrari racer Luigi Musso was killed at the French Grand Prix following an anonymous telegram urging him to drive faster. He drove with abandon until his wheel caught an edge and started a series of cartwheels flinging Musso to his death. At the German Grand Prix, Peter Collins was chasing the leader when his left wheel hit a dirt banking and he lost control. He died from his injuries. In a period of four weeks, Ferrari lost two drivers.
By all accounts, the 1961 racing season was one of triumph for Ferrari. The Italian Grand Prix, the final race of the season, found Ferrari driver Von Trips locked in battle with Scotsman Jim Clark. On the second lap, the two cars’ wheels touched, sending von Trips into a crowd. Fifteen, including Von Trips, died. Just as with the accident at the Mille Miglia, somebody had to pay the price and it wasn’t the organizers but Clark. Like Ferrari, the charges would ultimately be dropped.
In 1962, Ferrari began thinking about selling his company. Coincidently, Ford Motor Company, then the second largest in the world, announced it was re-entering auto racing. This could be the answer for both Ferrari and Ford. Ford sent due diligence teams and offered $18 million for 90 percent of the company. Final discussions turned to the racing team. When posed with the question of who would call the shots if Ferrari entered the Indianapolis 500, the Ford representative answered without hesitation that Ford would. The Ford representative was dismissed when Enzo said, “It was nice to know you.” When Henry Ford II learned of this, he said, “O.K., then, we’ll kick his ass.” Thus began the Ford vs. Ferrari war. Ford poured millions into the effort and in 1965, the Ford team finished 1-2-3 at Le Mans. Ford would be victorious the next year with a Ferrari entry finishing second.
Ferrari and Italian firm Fiat began negotiations around 1967-1968 for the sale of Ferrari which would give Enzo Ferrari the money to be more competitive. It would also solve Fiat’s engineering problem. Their unreliable cars had limited appeal outside of Italy. The deal was done in 1969 for an estimated $11 million of which Fiat received 40% of the Ferrari stock with Ferrari’s 49% ownership to be transferred to Fiat upon his death. Ten percent of the stock was vested in Ferrari’s son, Pietro Lardi and longtime associate Giovan Pininfarina received 1%. Fiat got the engineering expertise it needed…and Enzo Ferrari would run the racing efforts.
By 1973, Ferrari had withdrawn from all racing other than Formula One. After a miserable 1973 racing season when the team won only one race, Ferrari knew radical changes must be made to return to their former glory. He made a crucial hire of Niki Lauda and an improved car. While Lauda won two races in 1974, the next season Lauda won the world championship—Ferrari’s first since 1961. All believed that 1976 would be another strong year until Lauda was seriously burned in a crash at the German Grand Prix. He returned to racing six weeks later fighting through pain at the Italian Grand Prix where he finished eighth. Two races later in Japan, he had the possibility of remaining the world champion, but he crashed through a fence and parked his racer—an unpardonable sin to Enzo. He won the world championship in 1977 for Ferrari. He secretly signed an agreement with Bernie Ecclestone to drive for Brabham in 1978. When that became known, he left the team before the end of the season. Lauda had restored Ferrari’s luster. He would win a third world title in 1984 while driving for McLaren.
Ferrari reloaded for the 1978 season and hired Jody Scheckter and Gilles Villeneuve. Schecter won the driver’s championship in 1979. After struggling during the 1980 season, he retired. Schecter was replaced by Didier Pironi. Villeneuve and Pironi did not get along. In the 1982 San Marino Grand Prix, Villeneuve was leading followed by Pironi. It was tradition that for the final laps, the leader would remain the leader if the two were from the same team. But in this race, Pironi surged past Villeneuve on the last lap to win the race. Villeneuve was seething and did not get the support from the team he expected. Two weeks later during qualifying for the Belgium Grand Prix, Pironi held the fastest lap. Determined to take the pole, Villeneuve took to the track and rode over a tire of a slower car on the track resulting in his death. Later that year, Pironi was testing a new Goodyear tire at the German Grand Prix track when he crashed. While he survived, both legs were severely broken. This was the last opportunity for Ferrari to win the world championship during Enzo’s life.
Ferrari was a complicated man. He thrived on the details of putting together the team---the planning and preparation, the selection of the drivers, the engineers but he had no interest in the races and attended only the ones at Monza. He was surrounded by “yes men” who were afraid to tell Ferrari bad news. He was a master at creating tension and havoc within the team which was rife with political infighting. He was married to Laura Ferrari but this marriage was empty. The marriage produced a son, Dino, who died in his early twenties. He also had many liaisons outside of marriage, one of which resulted in a son, Piero Laudi who was recognized only after Laura Ferrari’s death.
This is an excellent book that gives in-depth insight into Enzo Ferrari and his single determination to dominate racing.