MAN ON A MARANELLO MISSION
Ronald Stern has devoted his life not just to creating the world’s largest Ferrari collection, but also to reuniting many of the factory’s lost treasures
a small dark blue jewellery box sits on the table looking relatively unassuming but aged, thanks to its frayed edges. Ronald Stern opens it as carefully as if he were trying to do origami without cracking an ancient papyrus. The lid clicks back to reveal a small pair of gold cufflinks with the Alfa Romeo crest enamelled onto them. Without an explanation, this might seem a little anticlimactic, but Ronald’s commentary puts them in their context: ‘In 1930 at the end of the first year of Scuderia Ferrari, when it was running Alfa Romeos, there was a celebration dinner for the team, with seven pairs of cufflinks given out to the directors. This is the only pair known to exist.’
With that he gently closes the box and delicately places it in a small plastic container brimful of similar treasures. Then, as you zoom out for some sense of scale, that container is put in a larger box full of similar containers, which then sits on a stack of identical items. Only then do you notice the rest of the room packed high with such crates, and lined with endless books and volumes, and fed by a narrow corridor overflowing with more boxes.
Those who have visited the Ferrari: Under The Skin exhibition at The Design Museum in London (which runs until 15 April) will have seen a room packed with items from this collection, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Going into Ronald Stern’s archive is a Howard Carter moment – welcome to the world’s most significant Ferrari collection. Not that it is solely about Ferrari: it spins off into the lives of its drivers way beyond their time with Il Commendatore, and traces its roots back into the world of Nicola Romeo.
Nor is it finished. But already it is so vast – with 5000 photos and more than 1000 books – that we can barely scratch the surface, can only hope that highlighting just a few items will give a sense of the whole.
Stern himself came late to Ferrari, and, of course, it all started with cars. He was on holiday in France in 1975 when he decided to go and see where Ferraris were made. He says: ‘The old man walked across the street and I was actually thunderstruck seeing him. I turned up there in an AC Cobra 289 [his second… at the age of 26] and some of the engineers and mechanics came out and said: “Ah! MG Inglese.” Because I was so proud of my Cobra I was devastated. There’s nothing wrong with an MG, but that’s when the 12-cylinder madness started.
‘Ferrari weren’t overly friendly so I went off to Lamborghini and bought a lime-green Miura SV with 7000 miles on the clock for £7000. A Countach followed. Then, after a few months I thought I had better get something sensible, so I swapped it for a Daytona Spider and a pair of JBL loudspeakers. It was my first Ferrari and one of the seven right-hand-drive examples.
‘After that I thought I would like a racing Ferrari and the best one to get would be a GTO. I heard about a ’62 car that had been sold and I spoke to the new owner and he seemed to be prepared to sell it, so I bought it with Malcolm Clarke, who I later bought out. He was a great chum who sadly died. I had it for three years and sold it to Nick Mason to raise funds to start my business. He has been a wonderful custodian of the car.’
Like all enthusiasts, Stern started picking up items that went with his cars, plus occasionally something grander – starting with a set of Ferrari yearbooks. It gathered momentum at the turn of the millennium and in the past decade it has accelerated exponentially. There are three reasons for this.
Number one: romance. As Stern explains: ‘It wasn’t responsible, but chums and I would tear across Europe in our Daytonas at 150160-170mph flat-stick across Belgium into France. You can’t do that now. Every week was an adventure, but the romance of driving has gone. I have replaced it with the romance of history and the people that made it – much more emotionally satisfying.’
Number two: the realisation that a great company’s history was at risk. ‘When I first saw that Enzo’s passport and driving licence and his marriage certificate and communion card were out there and available, I just thought “This is all wrong – it’s horrendous, and if I don’t save this it’s going to be really sad.” When I realised how much of Ferrari’s
SENSIBLE ‘I NEEDED CAR, SO A I SWAPPED MY COUNTACH FOR A DAYTONA SPIDER AND A PAIR OF JBL LOUDSPEAKERS’
history had seeped out over the years and had become scattered to the winds, I resolved to bring as much of it as I could back together.’
Number three: the epiphany that collecting is not about things, but about people and their lives, as told through artefacts. In 2008 a former Ferrari mechanic, known as The Transmission Man, died aged 94. Carlo Amadessi might have not been a ‘name’ and, despite being so tall that he stands out like a giraffe in photos, he remains resolutely uncaptioned in most books. But after his death a shoebox full of his cherished memorabilia was set to be split and sold. Stern stepped in and bought it en masse.
As he delved through it he was nearly moved to tears: alongside signed photos from the great drivers Amadessi had worked with, such as Hawthorn, Ascari, Fangio, Phil Hill, von Trips, Bandini, Ickx and Andretti, he had saved every memento from his entire working life with Ferrari. There were factory passes, his contract, a factory phone directory for Maranello, track passes for Sebring and Daytona in 1970, the air ticket for getting to Sebring from Milan in 1964 (four flights costing a total of $733), and his own photos of the team going sightseeing or visiting the zoo in Watkins Glen on days off.
‘You hear about Enzo and the designers and the drivers, but there must have been thousands of people like Amadessi who dedicated their working lives to the company,’ says Stern. ‘This is a story of a man’s life and it is important that we remember all the people who made Ferrari what it is.’
Having determined to keep everything together, he called on an old contact to organise it, lifelong Ferrari aficionado and author Nathan Beehl. Beehl’s sympathetic research and presentation of the Amadessi effects led to a call a few months later offering him employment. ‘I said to my wife it might only last six months, but that was eight years ago. Ronald just hasn’t stopped collecting.’
After spending any time with Stern and Beehl, you get wrapped up in the romance, too, and soon even the most mundane memo
becomes a highly charged emotion. The jewel in the crown is a series of albums packed with tens of thousands of factory documents. No-one quite knows how so much history escaped Maranello – there is speculation that boxes of old files were kept in Dino’s flat and were disposed of when a distraught Enzo ordered his son’s apartment to be cleared after his death. Or that some of the old paperwork was left behind when the factory moved to Maranello from Trento Trieste. They contain everything from a spy report on BRM to a job offer to Bandini.
You can witness the very moment the agreement between Ferrari and Ford foundered. On the contract Ford specifies that permission must be sought for a certain spend. In the margin in purple ink it says, in Italian, ‘you must be joking’… or words to that effect. Stern says: ‘Where Enzo was a genius was in branding himself through his purple ink, just as Steve Jobs would through his clothes years later.’ That ink is everywhere, in margins at the top and bottom of documents, in a handwritten five-page response to some engineers grumbling about the V12. These precious documents allow you to see into the heart of the workings of Maranello and the minds of its masters.
And that is what counts, and surprises. Yes, Stern has the only 100% complete set of Ferrari brochures on the planet; he has the helmets of just about every notable driver from Tazio Nuvolari and Mansell (his first ones for the Scuderia) to the lid that Michael Schumacher wore in his final GP for the team; he has Scheckter’s racesuit and pretty much everything else from 1979 including the trophy he won at Monza; he even has the only three-prancing-horse diamond brooch with ruby eyes that is not in the family.
And while he might have a complete set of the high-quality weekly newspapers that aspiring journalist Enzo Ferrari put out in the 1930s, plus Dino’s pith-style straw hat and 15 of the watches that were gifts from Enzo to friends, supporters and staff, the fact that Stern’s collection of postcards
‘STERN ONLY COMPLETE HAS THE SET OF FERRARI BROCHURES ON THE PLANET, AND THE LIDS OF JUST ABOUT EVERY NOTABLE DRIVER’
is incomplete eats away at him. Ferrari started issuing postcards of races, cars and drivers in 1947 and thereafter put out up to eight a year. No-one is certain how many there were in total, but Stern reckons he is ‘30 or 40 short’. The other Holy Grail is the drawings for the 125S. He has the Auto Avio 815 set, but hasn’t persuaded former Microsoft boss Jon Shirley to part with the 125’s. Yet.
There are many interesting ‘branches’ of the collection, such as chauffeur Peppino Videlli’s star-studded diaries, but the most evocative is Alberto Ascari. Buying the driver’s personal automobilia added a mass of trophies to Stern’s collection, and so much more, including the grazed wallet that was in his pocket during his fatal crash at Monza testing the 750 Monza at Castellotti’s behest and in a helmet borrowed from him.
Stern has both the helmets that the superstitious Ascari used throughout his career other than that fateful day, including the one he was wearing when he went into Monaco harbour in the Lancia D50 in 1955. There are many pairs of goggles, lenses painstakingly packaged and anotated in envelopes to say when they were used. Some still with flies on. Then there are the telegrams of condolence to his wife Mietta from the likes of Fangio, and the driver’s last two packets of cigarettes.
It might sound ghoulish, but it is actually quite reverential, with such items as the model of the 1952 F1 championship winner personally presented to Ascari by the Toschi wine company. Likewise, though the pristine leather jacket hangs casually on the wall, you know it is special. It is the one that Ascari wore to victory on the 1954 Mille Miglia.
On and on it goes, without you even asking about the ‘reserve’ stored elsewhere. It is so impressive that Pierro Ferrari came to spend a day with Stern. When we are done, you notice that we have talked for hours about rarity, even extinct items, about the thrill of the chase (such as taking a flight to Italy to pick up a single photo and come straight home), but never once in all that time has Stern mentioned prices or values. And that kind of sums it up, really.
Only 125 red copies of Stern, Beehl and Doug Nye’s Ferrari, La Nascita – ‘The Birth’ will be published, costing £1250 from Hortons Books.