FERRARI 500

Enzo Ferrari was conflicted when Formula 1 stuttered and almost died in 1952, because he felt a lingering tug of affection for the departed Alfa Romeo and their potent supercharged F1 cars, whose design he had championed while working for them in the 1930s. But he got over it well enough, for motor racing’s loss would be his gain: in the absence of enough decent F1 cars to populate grids, world championship races were open solely to Formula 2 machines for 1952-53. And Enzo already had a basic F2 car ready to go.

There was nothing particularly big or clever about the Ferrari 500. It was simply a reworked version of the Scuderia’s previous F2 car: a ladder chassis with transverse leaf springs up front and a De Dion axle at the rear, now located by trailing arms, but with a simpler and much more effective engine. Gioacchino Colombo’s V12 architecture would remain a mainstay of the Ferrari range for years to come, but in dainty two-litre form it had been well beaten in F2. Consequently, Enzo directed his new chief engineer, Aurelio Lampredi, to design a fourcylinder twin-cam engine as an alternative. It was competitive from the off.

Piero Taruffi won the first of the world championship rounds for Ferrari, but thereafter it was Alberto Ascari all the way – apart from at the Indy 500, which Ascari nevertheless had a crack at in a V12 car based on the ’51 F1 chassis. The anomalous Indianapolis rounds apart, a Ferrari 500 won every world championship grand prix from May 1952, until Maserati racer Juan Manuel Fangio broke their run at Monza on 13 September 1953. Ascari’s nine consecutive wins, equalled but never exceeded, underline Ferrari’s absolute dominance of the F2 era.