Day Enzo Ferrari refused to greet the president of Italy... jus because he arrived in a Maserati!
VinCEnzO LAnCiA, nicola romeo, Ettore Bugatti, the Maserati brothers, Ferruccio Lamborghini — and Enzo Ferrari: say what you like about the italians, but they do know a lot about cars.
And unless Jeremy Clarkson has a sexchange, ‘a passion for cars and the thrills that speed could provide’ does seem to be a male thing. Machines, competitiveness, propulsion — it’s all a product of testosterone. (i don’t know what this says about me, as i can’t drive. i failed even my lessons.)
Except as annoying distractions, women certainly hardly register in the Ferrari story as told in exhaustive, hagiographic detail by Monte, and also recently portrayed in a blockbuster film starring Adam Driver. There’s our hero’s mother, of course, Adalgisa, a woman whose bad moods provided a ‘ continuous tumult’ during Enzo’s childhood.
Signora Ferrari was morbidly jealous of her son’s girlfriends, and hated his wife, Laura, whom Enzo married in 1923. His ‘total commitment’ to cars meant he was a neglectful husband, ‘physically distant’, his priority being to put himself solely ‘at the complete disposal of the team and his team-mates’.
There was no time for a honeymoon. Enzo always missed wedding anniversaries, too, as he was off racing.
no wonder Laura was depressed, for which Monte shows scant sympathy.
Enzo ‘looked back at how Laura’s erratic behaviour . . . has pushed them apart,’ is how the biographer regards it. There was his mistress Lina and a girlfriend Fiamma, 36 years Enzo’s junior, who are given a brief line each.
Otherwise, Enzo, year after year, was ‘always focused on the design and development of new engines and mechanical components’. His cars were aimed at ‘race-loving gentlemen drivers’. Famous customers included Tony Curtis and Paul newman. Film director roberto rossellini wanted his car spray-painted the same grey and gold colour as his wife ingrid Bergman’s eyes.
Enzo was born in 1898, at the dawn of the automotive era, and he was entranced by ‘this new means of transportation’. Bored by school, he early on announced ‘i’m going to be a racing driver,’. He saw ‘cars as a means to freedom.’ Though during World War i Enzo ‘found himself shoeing mules’, he was soon able to use an inheritance from his late father (a railway engineer) to enter races held on country roads — there as yet were no purpose-built tracks. Organisers kept down the dust with barrels of water.
Wearing flying goggles, Enzo, a daring young man in his jaunty jalopy, raced around the Abruzzi, ‘trapped in the snow and surrounded by starving wolves’. Fighting through fog and mud and dodging herds of cows, Enzo went along dirt roads, through pine forests, up hills and across salt marshes ‘ close to the Adriatic Sea’. He won good prize money, received sponsorship fees, and was awarded gold medals. At the age of 26, Enzo was knighted by the King of italy.
Deciding to retire from racing when his son, Dino, was born in 1932, Enzo opened his Modena garages, workshops and showrooms, where eventually he employed 1,742 mechanics and technicians. The prancing horse Scuderia-Ferrari logo became world famous, embossed today on watches, pens, jewellery, clothing, and other lucrative merchandise.
The statistics are impressive. By 1935, a Ferrari could reach 224mph. By World War ii, Ferrari had participated in 225 races, with a total of 715 cars, 144 victories and 171 podium finishes. refuelling and changing four tyres took 30 seconds in 1952, reduced by the pit-stop teams to
23 seconds by 1975. However, what comes over strongly in this book is the sheer danger of the enterprise. Eventually, even the Vatican expressed concern, about these ‘suicidally great sports champions’, the drivers who kept being killed, as tyres disintegrated at the huge velocities and brakes failed, as the philosophy was: ‘ Brakes were not needed to go fast’.
Guy Moll, doing 168mph, was ‘thrown from the cockpit and found on the opposite side of the road’. At Le Mans in 1955, 83 people were killed when a car leapt into the grandstand. In 1957, a Ferrari plunged into a chicane and disintegrated. In 1958, a Ferrari bounced four times, ejecting the driver, who ‘landed on his head’.
Niki Lauda was a protege, until he nearly burned to death, inhaling poisonous fumes. It was thought ‘Ferrari had not equipped its cars with automatic fire extinguishers’. Against the odds, Lauder survived.
‘Enzo thought Niki was finished as a driver, and told him so’, which was somewhat blunt, with Lauda lying there in bandages. Lauda was replaced on the team by Gilles Villeneuve, who was killed in 1982, when his car ‘launched into a dramatic spin in the air’, the driver ‘lying prone on the grass without a helmet’.
Enzo, with his ‘plenipotentiary powers and ambitions’, comes across in this book as a Godfather-like figure, 6ft 2in tall, 265lb, wearing dark glasses indoors and keeping watch over everyone from his lair.
Never deigning to visit actual race meetings in person, he communicated via telex and watched races on multiple television screens. He listened in to ‘any telephone call made inside his company’. Like Don Corleone, he expected ‘unquestioning obedience’, and Monte tells of
many a ‘violent verbal confrontation’, if any executive dared come out with ideas of their own.
If Enzo’s ‘enduring love affair was with engines’, he was hopeless with human beings, as if on the spectrum, using today’s term. He had no other interests or hobbies. He certainly possessed no sense of humour — the only laugh in the entire story is when the president of Italy visited the factory and Enzo refused to greet him as the premier and his entourage had arrived at Ferrari in a Maserati.
YET,then there’s his conduct during the war, when his factory was obliged by Mussolini to make ball bearings for the Germans. Enzo saved a Jewish lawyer from a mob by driving him away very fast. He allowed the Resistance to use the factory at night to manufacture the nails that stopped Nazi lorries. Enzo personally hid Polish families in outbuildings, ‘risking his own life’.
Furthermore, there is the sad tale of Enzo and Laura’s son, Dino, who died of muscular dystrophy at the age of 24. Enzo ever afterwards wore a black tie and visited and prayed at the tomb every single morning before work. Monte mentions a ghoulish moment in 1979, when the tomb was robbed, the coffin opened and the corpse disinterred. ‘ After all these years, I would never have thought that I would see my son again,’ Enzo said, surveying the scene.
Enzo died of kidney failure in 1988, aged 90, having remained in charge until the end. On his deathbed, ‘just a handful of Ferrari’s men were allowed to visit him’, like henchmen paying court to Marlon Brando.
As Monte says, ‘ Ferrari, as a company, will never die’, and to ensure immortality, no more than 1,436 cars are made annually — luxury models with leather upholstery, ‘sporty, eyecatching, elegantly understated’.