How Enzo Ferrari Created the Greatest Racing Team in Motorsport History

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How Enzo Ferrari Created the Greatest Racing Team in Motorsport History

Bob Sorokanich · Robb Report

Wed, Jul 31, 2024 ·

8 min read

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Ferrari may be the most recognizable supercar manufacturer on earth. Throughout its 80-plus-year history, the company has introduced some of the most legendary and desirable sports cars ever made. Hard to believe, but founder Enzo Ferrari viewed the road-car company as something of a necessary distraction, a way to make money to support his ultimate lifelong passion: Racing. This is the story of the intensely private, ruthlessly domineering, obsessive, and somewhat tragic figure who founded a juggernaut Formula 1 team, and then built the world's most highly-desired sports cars to support it.

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Motor-Obsessed in Modena

Enzo Anselmo Giuseppe Maria Ferrari was born in February 1898 in Modena, a city in northern Italy. The Ferrari family were working-class people—Enzo's father Alfredo had a small workshop where he did fabrication and mechanical work for the local railroad. Enzo had little formal education, instead working alongside his father in the workshop. When he was 10 years old, Enzo witness the event that would set him on the course of his life's work: He watched as Italian racing driver Felice Nazzaro won first place in the 1908 Circuito di Bologna, an automobile race held on the roads of the nearby city of Bologna. From then on, Enzo Ferrari dreamed of becoming a racing driver.

Ferrari served in World War I with the Italian army, but was discharged in 1918 after becoming gravely ill during the flu pandemic that swept through Europe. He had already been subject to great personal loss, witnessing as his father and his older brother Alfredo Jr., known in the family as Dino, died from the flu. Family tragedy would come to define Enzo Ferrari's life.

Once a Racer, Always a Racer

In 1919, Enzo Ferrari competed in his first automobile race, driving for Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali, a small automaker in Milan. The following year, Ferrari was hired as a professional racing driver for Alfa Romeo, then one of the most dominant automakers in European racing. The talented Ferrari won three Grand Prix races in Italy in 1924.

In these early days, auto racing was often a gruesome sport. As a professional competitor, Ferrari witnessed the deaths of two of his driving heroes, Ugo Sivocci and Antonio Ascari, and the experience affected him deeply. Despite his obsession with racing, Ferrari would later admit that he competed "halfheartedly" in the wake of these deaths. But as his fervor behind the wheel began to wane, Ferrari was developing a new interest in how racing was managed from behind the pit wall. When Enzo's son Alfredo was born in 1932, the new father quit driving race cars and focused on building and managing his own racing team.

That team was called Scuderia Ferrari (literally, "Ferrari Stables,") and from the start it was home to the best racing drivers, including legendary pilot Tazio Nuvolari. The Ferrari team soon adopted the logo of the black prancing horse, once worn as a good-luck charm by World War I Italian fighter pilot Francesco Baracca. The stallion appeared on the Ferrari team's Alfa Romeo race cars, but would soon come to be associated with Ferrari's own automotive creations.

The Founding of Ferrari

Amid long-simmering disagreements, Enzo Ferrari ended his relationship with Alfa Romeo in 1939. He started a company in Modena manufacturing race-car parts, but with the outbreak of World War II, Ferrari was forced to turn over his factory to be used by the Mussolini government's war effort. The facility was destroyed by Allied bombing, forcing Ferrari to move production from Modena to Maranello. In 1947, Enzo Ferrari officially launched the car company that still bears his name to this day.

From that moment, Enzo Ferrari viewed the Alfa Romeo racing team as his ultimate rival. The first Ferrari race cars entered competition in 1948, and the following year, drivers Luigi Chinetti and Peter Michell-Thomson cinched Ferrari's first major victory at the 1949 24 Hours of Le Mans. In 1950, Formula One was established; Ferrari entered in the inaugural Driver's World Championship, and is the only team to have competed in every season of F1 racing from its inauguration to the current day. The Ferrari racing team nabbed its first F1 Grand Prix at Silverstone in 1951, and won the F1 championship in 1952 and 1953, sealing the newly-formed company's reputation as an F1 juggernaut—and vanquishing rival Alfa Romeo.

Road Cars to Fund Racing

The very first automobiles to bear the Ferrari name were built in 1947, when the company turned out two examples of the 125 Sport. The first road-going Ferraris were built in 1948, and soon, the company was turning out front-engine, V-12-powered sports cars and grand tourers.

Famously, Enzo Ferrari viewed his company's business in road-going cars as a necessary but not-very-enticing way to make money to fund the company's racing efforts. Soon, though, Ferrari's output of sports cars would greatly exceed the number of race cars the company sold. Enzo Ferrari himself had little interest in sports cars, which at the time were raw, punishing machines with little concession to comfort. For his own daily driving, Enzo preferred opulent grand-touring cars, and he often chose to ride around in a chauffeured luxury sedan.

Tragedy and Enzo

Enzo Ferrari's life was often punctuated by great tragedy. He was known to keep a distant relationship with his team's racing drivers, seemingly as a way of preventing his own emotional hardship in an era when racing drivers often died in competition. In 1956, Enzo suffered the greatest tragedy of his life when Dino, his beloved son, died at age 24 from complications of muscular dystrophy. Dino had learned engineering and design alongside his father, and in the months leading up to his death, had been working on development of a V6 racing engine. In tribute to Dino, the series of V6 and V8 engines that stemmed from his engineering work were known as Ferrari Dino engines, and the Ferrari company went on to build a Dino line of road cars using variants of these engines. After Dino's passing, Enzo Ferrari spent the rest of his life in mourning. He wore black clothes every day, and made daily visits to Dino's grave.

Flirting with Ford, Committed to Fiat

In 1963, Enzo Ferrari began secret conversations with the Ford Motor Company. The American automaker was interested in taking over Ferrari, which would have made Enzo a fabulously wealthy man, but the founder withdrew from negotiations at the last minute, as Ford would not let him maintain full independent control over the racing division. Ferrari had been riding high in sports-car racing, winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans six times in a row from 1960 to 1965; incensed, Ford Motor Company launched a no-holds-barred effort to topple Ferrari, culminating in the Ford GT40 winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans four times straight from 1966 through 1969.

The company's finances were still in dire condition, and in 1969, Enzo Ferrari sold 50 percent of his company to Italian automaker giant Fiat. While he stepped down as director of Ferrari's production-car division, the agreement left Enzo fully in charge of Ferrari's racing programs, and had Fiat paying royalties for use of Ferrari's facilities in Maranello and Modena.

Later Years

It's reported that Enzo Ferrari rarely left his hometown region of Maranello and Modena after the 1950s, and never attended any races taking place outside of Italy in his later years. He was an intensely private person, ruling Ferrari largely from behind the scenes, and was rarely interviewed or seen publicly. Enzo had an illegitimate son, Piero, with his mistress in 1945, but the son was not recognized as part of the Ferrari family until Enzo's wife died in 1978 . Piero Ferrari now serves as a vice-chairman of Ferrari, owning roughly 10 percent of the company.

Enzo Ferrari died in 1988 from complications of leukemia, at 90 years old . He had just witnessed the unveiling of the Ferrari F40 supercar, which would go on to become legendary in part as the final Ferrari model approved by Enzo himself . He was buried in a private ceremony attended only by immediate family, and his death was not announced until after his funeral had been concluded. A few weeks after Enzo's death, the Ferrari F1 team took first and second place at the Italian Grand Prix, the only race not won by McLaren in the 1988 F1 season.

Enzo Ferrari was posthumously inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1998, and added to the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2000. In 2002, Enzo Ferrari's life and legacy were honored when the company launched the Ferrari Enzo, a mid-engine supercar built in limited numbers and priced at $650,000—the fastest and most expensive Ferrari built to date.

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