Ferrari – The Golden Years

LEONARDO ACERBI, Giorgio Nada Editore, £60, ISBN 978 88 7911 674 9

This book’s title is as lazily bland as a title could be, despite the suggestion of incisive comment within hinted at by the author’s surname. Nor was printing the bilingual Italian and English text in light grey on a white background very sensible. But the photographs… Oh, the photographs.

They are the work of Franco Villani, ever present during those ‘golden years’, which turn out to be the Enzo years: from the Ferrari company’s beginnings in 1947 to Enzo’s passing in 1988. Author and multiple caption writer Acerbi has divided the 360-page, square-format, hefty hardback by decade, with photographic hues gradually brightening from sometimes-sepia monochromes to brilliant reds as the past gets more recent.

There are action shots, candid people shots, dusty shots, reportage shots, behind-the-scenes shots. There’s John Surtees deep in conversation with Mauro Forghieri at Monaco 1965, just before

set the fastest time. There’s much mad Mille Miglia action, a fantastic cornering shot of Alberto Ascari in his bug-spattered Ferrari 375 in the 1951 Italian GP, a picture of a broadly smiling Enzo receiving his honorary engineering degree at Bologna University in 1961.

Every spread has a photographic gem to make you chuckle or gaze in awe or wonder at the heat and the mid-race chaos. Clay Reggazoni looks miserably at his misbehaving engine; Niki Lauda reappears, head bandaged, on the scene after his near-death Nürburgring crash. It’s all here, right up to the Michele Alboreto and Gerhard Berger era and their McLaren-beating one-two at Monza’s Italian Grand Prix, just a month after 90-year-old Enzo’s death.

Never before have we seen such a fantastic compilation of Ferrari racing photography. But why are the captions all written in capitals? Photography one, typography nil…