FERRARI HELPED FUEL RISE OF HIS RIVALS
Enzo was a legendary racer and carmaker, but he wasn’t well liked, writes Neil Vorano.
As Ferrari celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, it’s difficult not to separate the company from the man who started it all: Enzo Ferrari.
First racing for various outfits before the Second World War, then forming his own car factory and race team just after it in 1947, Ferrari was a hard-working driver and entrepreneur, clever on both sides of the pit wall, a man who conceded to building road cars only to finance his team’s racing exploits.
He was also an arrogant, my-word-is-law autocrat who ruled with the proverbial iron fist, someone who couldn’t give a damn what you thought about him or his cars. It’s part of the reason the company had to wait until after his death before offering any colour other than red for its road cars. It’s also a large part of what made Ferrari — both on the street and on the track — so successful.
So, yeah, he made a lot of people angry. But before you “tsk, tsk” this cold-hearted, calculated ruthlessness, I instead implore you to thank him for it, and not just for the 70 years of his company’s existence. In a life with so many twists, with glorious successes and catastrophic failures, and what could — and should — be the subject of a Hollywood film, the ego of Il Commendatore has spurred the successes of others in the auto world, simply out of their sheer, unadulterated spite. These entities tried to — and more often than not, did — succeed just because the head of Ferrari was an arrogant jerk.
Enzo Ferrari made these people angry. And here’s what they did with that anger.
THE PALACE REVOLT
After the death of his beloved son, Dino, in 1956, Enzo Ferrari became more withdrawn from business.
His wife, Laura Dominica Garello, had become an influential voice in the company, but she would also chastise workers and make extraordinary demands; so much so that, in 1961, sales manager Girolamo Gardini was fed up and gave Ferrari an ultimatum: her or me.
Of course, Gardini was fired immediately, but this created a backlash among other figures in the company. Among them, chief engineer Giotto Bizzarrini, technical director Carlo Chiti, Scuderia Ferrari team manager Romolo Tavoni and others, who had a lawyer draft a letter for Enzo Ferrari stating their opposition to Gardini’s forced departure. As you’d expect, the whole lot of them were shown the door in a mass exodus dubbed The Palace Revolt.
The group found funding via the very rich Count Giovanni Volpi of Vienna to start their own Formula One team, called Automobili Turismo e Sport, though in its single year of existence it proved to be a failure.
Bizzarrini, however, went on to engineer a string of beautiful road cars, including the Iso Rivolta, then more through his own short-lived company, Societa Prototipi Bizzarrini. As well, at the behest of Volpi, Bizzarrini redesigned an original Ferrari 250 GT SWB into what is now referred to as the “Breadvan.”
He later found one more way to stick it to Enzo.
FERRUCCIO LAMBORGHINI
In the early 1960s, Ferruccio Lamborghini had built a sizable business building farm tractors in the small Italian town of Sant’Agata Bolognese, so of course he decided to reward himself with a Ferrari 250 GT, built less than an hour’s drive away in Maranello. But Lamborghini was dissatisfied with the car and especially the clutch, which had to be serviced many times.
Being mechanically capable, he figured out a better method and decided to travel to Ferrari’s headquarters to discuss it with the head man himself. But Enzo didn’t take kindly to a tractor maker telling him how to improve his car and, in no uncertain terms, expressed this to Ferruccio.
Incensed at the rude dismissal, Ferruccio immediately set out to design a car to compete with Ferrari and, in just four months, debuted the Lamborghini 350 GTV at the 1963 Turin Motor Show, complete with a detuned engine originally designed by none other than Giotto Bizzarrini.
CARROLL SHELBY
Carroll Shelby was a rootin’tootin’, hard drinkin’ manly man from Texas, a car builder, entrepreneur and a racer who won the 1959 Le Mans despite battling severe dysentery right before the race.
During the 1950s, he occasionally raced for Ferrari, but in 1958 his good friend, Luigi Musso, was killed at the wheel of a Ferrari in the French Grand Prix. At the time, Enzo was well known for psychologically pitting his drivers against each other, thinking it would spur them on to greater speed. But Shelby believed this attitude is what killed Musso and many other Ferrari drivers, and his bitterness toward Enzo partly fuelled the development of the AC Cobra, and eventually the Cobra Coupe that beat Ferrari in the GT class to win the 1964 Le Mans.
That wouldn’t be the end of Shelby’s battles with Ferrari.
HENRY FORD II
Ferrari was in dire financial straits in 1963, and Ford Motor Company offered to buy the sports-car maker outright. It almost happened; Ford’s chief executive, Henry Ford II, and a team of executives met with Enzo Ferrari and his lawyer to discuss the details. But when Enzo found out the deal was to include his beloved racing team, he refused and left the room in a huff.
Henry II was outraged at this embarrassment. Knowing how much racing meant to Enzo, the CEO decided to beat him at his own game at the most glamorous race in Europe: the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Ford poured millions into the program, even buying a small sports-car company in England as a base of operations, and developed the GT40.
But the next two years ended in complete failure; not a single car even finished the race. Despite Ford executives imploring Henry II to stop wasting money, he instead upped the spending and enlisted the help of none other than Carroll Shelby to refine and improve the cars. Shelby famously said, “Next year, Ferrari’s ass is mine.”
In 1966, Ford put no fewer than eight GT40s on the Le Mans grid in scattergun hopes of at least one of them crossing the finish line. Not only did four of them finish, but Ford took the one-two-three top spots to beat Ferrari — finally.