Enzo Ferrari – Larger than Life

His dreams, his creatures, his victories – an attempt to get closer to Enzo Ferrari.

So it’s time to scrutinise a few of these myths on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Enzo Ferrari was neither an outstanding racing driver nor an outstanding engineer – but with a lot of trial and error, he developed into a great team boss who achieved plenty of victories with the Alfa Romeo racing cars before the Second World War, sponsored racing drivers and impressively promoted the brand’s fame.

Italy provided Ferrari with the perfect breeding ground for his ambition and ambitions: This is where most car and motorbike races were held from 1920 onwards – and where he first wanted to succeed as a racing driver. After a few successes (he never won a really important race), he joined Alfa Romeo in 1920 and founded Scuderia Ferrari in 1929, which – after Alfa Romeo could no longer afford a works team from 1934 – represented the brand in many races.

The Modena-based Scuderia quickly developed into a semi-official works team for Alfa Romeo thanks to Enzo Ferrari’s organisational skills and strategic ability to attract the best drivers and find financially strong sponsors. From 1930 onwards, the Scuderia received sports cars such as the magnificent 6C 1750 and 8C 2300 models, which won a double victory for the first time with the painted Cavallino Rampante at the 24-hour race in Spa in the spring of 1932.

The famous logo had originally been painted on the fuselage of the aircraft of Italian pilot Francesco Baracca and was offered to Enzo Ferrari in 1923 by the parents of the ace pilot Ferrari – he then placed the black horse on a yellow background, the colour of Maranello.

From 1934 onwards, Alfa Romeo had also given the Scuderia the P3 GP cars, which – with the emergence of the Silver Arrows from Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union – won less and less often. Nevertheless, Enzo Ferrari remained loyal to Alfa Romeo and was also involved in the development of the legendary Alfetta (Type 158) until 1939, which was to dominate GP racing after the war. Then a dispute with Ugo Gobbatto, the director of Alfa Romeo since 1933, led to his dismissal – he was compensated with a lot of money, but was not allowed to use the name Scuderia Ferrari for four years.

So Ferrari founded the company Auto Avio Costruzione (AAC), which specialised in the contract production of small four-cylinder aircraft engines. But in December 1939, the young Alberto Ascari and his wealthy friend Marchese Lotario Rangoni Macchiavelli di Modena – what a great name – asked him to build a car for the Mille Miglia. As the name Ferrari was not allowed to appear in this context, the car was given the designation AAC 815, which indicated that the car had an eight-cylinder engine with a displacement of 1.5 litres – and consisted of two Fiat 508C Ballila four-cylinder engines mounted one behind the other with modified Ballila cylinder heads. The output: 73 hp and a top speed of around 170 km/h. And the fact that its AAC 815 designation sounded similar to the Alfetta 158 probably appealed to him too. Well, the two vehicles failed, but today they are regarded as the legitimate forerunners of the Ferrari models.

He survived the war as a manufacturer of replicas of German grinding machines – whether he ever acquired the licences for this remains hidden in the darkness of history, but his products were of good quality and so he continued to work to their satisfaction after the German invasion.

Enzo Ferrari had to wait eight years before he was finally able to build racing cars again after the end of the war. He had made good use of the time and entered the race in 1947 with a fascinating engine: The 1.5-litre V12 designed by Gioacchino Colombo.

The first of its kind

On 11 May 1947, the 125, the first Ferrari ever built, appeared on a race track in Piacenza – although the car stopped while leading with damage to the oil pump, countless victories followed from the second race onwards.

After the retirement in Piacenza, Franco Cortese won the Gran Prix de Roma on 25 May 1947 – but it soon became clear that the 100 hp was not enough; racing drivers always demand more power.

As Enzo Ferrari named the type designation according to the displacement of a cylinder for many decades, the Type 125 therefore had 125 cm³ of displacement per cylinder, which multiplied by twelve resulted in 1.5 litres of displacement.

The 2-litre Type 166 was soon to follow, heralding the era of great victories: from 1948 to 1953, Ferrari won the Mille Miglia six times; in 1949, the later US importer Luigi Chinetti won the 24 Hours of Le Mans with a 166 MM Barchetta, and shortly afterwards he would also finish as the winner at the 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps.

After Piero Taruffi’s victory with a 212 Inter at the Mexican Carrera Panamericana, Ferrari became more popular in the USA and Enzo Ferrari was also represented in Grand Prix racing again with his first start at the 1950 Monaco GP. And on 14 July 1951, the Argentinian Froilán González won the first Formula 1 victory for the Scuderia at the British GP in Silverstone. Within just five years, Enzo Ferrari had won all the important races. The legend’s pedestal was cast.

No racing vehicles without road vehicles

Enzo Ferrari was back in his element: he could build racing cars, deploy his drivers as he wished and conquer with the help of Luigi Chinetti. He was living in France in 1940 and – after the Italian government called him up to the army – replied that he had already fought for his fatherland in the First World War. Chinetti immediately boarded the next ship to the USA, set up a workshop there, returned to Italy in 1948, won Le Mans and Spa in 1949 and persuaded Ferrari to give him representation in the USA.

This was probably the best decision Enzo ever made, as Chinetti provided the USA with almost countless racing and road cars over the next few decades – and thus created the breeding ground for Ferrari, which provided him with the money for his racing department. Which in turn ensured even more victories, which in turn fuelled the myth, which in turn boosted the sale of racing cars for the huge US racing scene, which in turn boosted the sale of road-going sports cars – in short: which massively accelerated the rise of the once so small factory in Maranello.

Now Enzo Ferrari was only interested in his racing cars – but as a shrewd businessman, he realised that building racing cars cost a lot of money, even if he was able to sell more and more of them to rich private racing drivers. So the money had to come from privateers who wanted to put a Ferrari – and thus a part of the legend – in their garage. In the early 1950s, Ferrari began to bring order to its complicated and convoluted model programme – both visually and technically.

In the early years, the Touring Superleggera, Ghia, Vignale and Zagato delivered fascinating one-offs with an almost exuberant imagination, often with a little more chrome and in daring two-colour paintwork – they not only provided an initial healthy financial basis, but their presence also guaranteed that the label became more desirable.

However, the Carrozzeria Touring was more committed to elegant understatement and lightweight construction – Giannino Marzotto won the Mille Miglia in 1950 with his blue 195 Sport Touring Berlinetta.

Harmonious home at Pininfarina

Ferrari quickly recognised the importance of the major motor shows in Paris, Geneva, Frankfurt, London and New York – the press made the headlines and buyers were always on hand. And then there were also interested parties who wanted to have their own personal Gran Turismo built. Who knows how happy and satisfied Enzo Ferrari was with the visual appearance of his first Gran Turismo models? Almost every car was unique.

There was a lack of continuity that made his models unmistakable on the world market. Then Carrozzeria Pinin Farina came to the rescue.

The first 212 Inter Cabriolet in 1952 marked the beginning of a decades-long collaboration that was to produce some of the most beautiful vehicles in automotive history – the secret? Clear lines, elegantly stretched surfaces, harmonious proportions and small, elegant details. Pinin Farina celebrated a unique blend of understatement and the knowledge that a mechanical masterpiece with unbridled power and the adventure of the racetrack was concealed beneath the hand-trimmed bodywork. The Carrozzeria subtly varied the oval radiator opening and the headlights positioned next to it – it was this continuity that created the typical face of the front-engined Gran Turismo models until the folding headlights demanded new solutions in the early 1970s, which Pininfarina delivered with aplomb, seeking and finding its way into a new design language with the 365 GTC/4 as the last front-engined V12 model before the age of mid-engined companions.

And parallel to the design revolution, the 250 series also brought peace and quiet to the engine range – the 3-litre twelve-cylinder engines were the backbone of the Ferrari model range from 1953 until 1964 when production of the 250 GT/L was discontinued. Although the 250 LM was introduced in 1964, only the prototype had a 3-litre engine – 3.3-litre engines were always used in the 1964 and 1965 races, which is why the 250 LM should actually be called the 275 LM.

The 250 models were beautiful: 250 GT Europa, 250 GT Tour de France, 250 GT SWB, 250 GT California Spyder, 250 GT/Lusso – in addition, the 250 GTE 2+2 and the 250 GT Coupé became bestsellers for the first time with larger numbers. Above all, however, the 250 GTO was enthroned, shrouded in legend, unbeaten on the racetracks for years, collecting titles and today priceless. The last change of ownership of a GTO is said to have cost the buyer 70 million dollars.

Enzo Ferrari, the engine man

Now Enzo Ferrari was at the top – with the 275 and 330 series, the engine and performance grew, the number of cars produced grew in parallel, and the racing department delighted the world with prototypes for the one-make world championship and GP companions for the great love of the now Commendatore for Grand Prix racing.

This was his real home – here he pulled out all the stops to win. However, he was an engine man – ‘the engine is the heart of a racing car, the rest has to serve the power unit’. For a long time, Ferrari refused to follow the mid-engine trend; he also despised disc brakes until the Brit Peter Collins simply had Dunlop disc brakes installed in his Ferrari service car in England. He still favoured twelve-cylinder engines when Porsche and Renault were already winning with ten-cylinder engines – turbochargers were anathema to him. He often had to be forced to innovate. And he played the racing drivers off against each other – the list of racing drivers who died in a race is endless – and the battles between him and his drivers are legendary.

But the Ferrari nimbus could no longer be defeated – although the racing departments always cost more money than the road cars brought in. For this reason, the finalised purchase agreement between Ford and Ferrari lapsed when Enzo noticed that Henry Ford also wanted to influence the costs in the racing department – he threw the Ford representative out of the office and turned to Giovanni Agnelli, the owner of FIAT and uncrowned king of Italy.

Agnelli took over exactly 50 per cent of the shares in 1969 – with a right of first refusal on a further 40 per cent that has since been exercised (the rest has remained with his son Piero Ferrari to this day). FIAT took care of the road cars and financed the expensive construction of the 512 racing cars, which were intended to compete against the overpowering Porsche 917 racing cars.

With the introduction of ever stricter safety, fuel consumption and emissions laws, sales of the less powerful Ferrari models in the USA – Ferrari’s most important market – collapsed from the mid-1970s onwards. The model range comprised the eight-cylinder 308 and 328 models, followed in 1980 by the comparatively uninspired Mondial – topped by the 400i as a 2+2 in various versions and the 512 BBi, which was then followed by the Testarossa, which became known mainly through Miami Vice and Don Johnson.

These were not good years for Ferrari – and even after Jody Scheckter won the world championship title in 1979, it took until 2000 for Michael Schumacher to bring the title back to Maranello for the first time. In 1984, the new Group B regulations for rally sport resulted in a large number of unusual vehicles – only 200 vehicles had to be built for homologation, and Ferrari created the first supercar after the 250 GTO with the 288 GTO. Instead of the required 200 vehicles, 272 of the 400 hp eight-cylinder engines with a displacement of 2,855 cc and two IHI turbochargers were ultimately built. This was one of the triggers of the great Ferrari renaissance, which was topped by the legendary F40 – from 1987 to 1992, no fewer than 1,315 examples of the 478 hp racing car in disguise were produced, which were offered to selected customers at a price of 444,000 marks. The F40 immediately became an object of speculation, with prices soaring into the seven-figure range, especially after the death of Enzo Ferrari on 14 August 1988.

The new era after Enzo Ferrari

With the death of Enzo Ferrari, the old models received an unexpected price boost – and the company was intelligent enough to reinvent itself, which was also helped by Michael Schumacher’s 5 world championship titles, which he won between 2000 and 2004. Then came the birth of the supercars, which, after the 288 GTO and the F40, were complemented by the F50, the Enzo and the LaFerrari.

Ferrari also remembered its customers who wanted to go to the racetrack and created a large number of racing variants of the road models that have been and continue to be successful on the world’s racetracks.

The fact that Maranello reintroduced a twelve-cylinder model with a front/mid-engine into the range with the 550 ‘Maranello’ presented in 1996, which was replaced over the years by the 599 GTB (2006) and the F12 (2012), which was then succeeded by the 812 in 2017 – of course there were many variants, open and more powerful than the GTO, always limited and a good investment. The 456 GT/M, the 612 Scaglietti, the FF (with selectable all-wheel drive!) and the GTC4 Lusso also generated good sales as 2+2 models with 12 cylinders that were suitable for families to a certain extent. However, the vast majority of Ferrari models came to dealerships as mid-engined companions with eight-cylinder engines – the 308/328 was followed by the 348, the F 355, the 360, the F 430, the 458, the 488 and today there is the F8. Available as a coupé, as a Spyder, as a racing version – and those who wanted a more cosy option (if you want to talk about cosiness at Ferrari) could opt for the California with a front-mounted eight-cylinder engine and its successor Portofino from 2008, which was joined by a closed version called the Roma in 2020. A multitude of models that did not really sharpen the brand essence.

And with the new SF90 – named after the 90th birthday of Scuderia Ferrari – the era of plug-in hybrids has now also begun at Ferrari: With a system output of 1,000 hp (735 kW), the 4-litre V8 engine now has more power than the legendary twelve-cylinder engines for the first time. The new era is outstripping the classic era – and if the augurs are right, Ferrari will soon be delighting us with an SUV. Enzo Ferrari would be turning in his grave – or turning the SUV into a racing car.

Fotos Ferrari S.p.A.

Author: Jürgen Lewandowski

Jürgen Lewandowski schreibt seit mehr als 40 Jahren über Menschen und Autos - und hat mehr als 100 Bücher veröffentlicht. Traumklassiker: Alfa Romeo 8C 2900 Touring Spider und Lancia Rally 037. Eigener Klassiker: Alfa Romeo R.Z. von 1993. View all posts by Jürgen Lewandowski →