by A. J. Baime
Dino’s body was eased into the Ferrari family crypt at the San Cataldo cemetery in Modena. Enzo Ferrari slipped on a pair of dark sunglasses that became as much a part of his face as the nose they sat on. The office Dino kept was left intact; his possessions—his appointment book, his pen—remained exactly where they were when his fingers last touched them. In his own office at the factory, Ferrari mounted a portrait of his son above a sconce, like a shrine. Each morning Ferrari made a ritual of brooding at Dino’s tomb.
The man was now fifty-eight years old, with no legitimate heir to carry on the legacy he had dedicated his life to creating. He believed that he had lost everything that mattered to him, with the exception of one thing: his cars. He would deny them nothing.
Ferrari could remember the day he was seduced by automobiles. He was eleven years old. The year was 1909.
He lived with his parents and brother in a small flat above his father’s metal shop on the outskirts of Modena, and every morning he awoke to the sound of hammers clanging below. One day he rose from bed and set out across the rail tracks adjacent to his home. He hiked two miles alone. In the countryside the Modena Automobile Association had organized a race called the Record del Miglio. A group of gentleman drivers were going to attempt to break the mile speed record.
Donkeys far outnumbered automobiles on Modena’s streets in 1909. Motorcars were objects of curiosity, and a chance to see how fast they could go lured a bustling crowd. Enzo took in the scene: Mechanics paced next to piles of tires and fuel drums. Time keepers sat at a table near a banner with FINISH written on it by hand. The silence gave warning and then it appeared: the thunderous racing car. A man named Da Zara set the best time in the flying mile that day: 87.148 mph.
World War I derailed Ferrari’s ambitions. The war ravaged Italy, destroying its economy and infrastructure. And yet, the war accelerated the innovation of automobiles and airplanes. Sophisticated new machinery resulted, as well as a generation of men accustomed to speed and danger. They had not forgotten their lost brothers. Bitterness lingered, and in the 1920s car races served as symbolic warfare. Cars raced in national colors: red for Italy, blue for France, green for England, yellow for Belgium, white (later silver) for Germany.
The war left Ferrari penniless, his father and brother dead. He was relatively uneducated, having sat through four years of elementary school and three of trade school. But he possessed a valuable talent—a knack for fixing things.
At age twenty-three, he joined Alfa Romeo as a test driver, mechanic, and competitor. He earned his first victory on June 17, 1923, at a race in Ravenna. While he looked out from the podium, a man pushed through the crowd and introduced himself as the Count Enrico Baracca, father of the Italian war hero Francesco Baracca, a Modenese who’d shot down thirty-four enemy planes before he was killed in 1919. The ace pilot flew with a black Prancing Horse, the symbol of his squadron, painted on his plane’s fuselage. It was Baracca’s mother who told the young racing driver: “Ferrari, why don’t you put my son’s Cavallino Rampante on your car? It will bring you luck.”
Ferrari laid this Prancing Horse symbol against a yellow shield, the color of Modena. This badge would one day become one of the most recognizable brand symbols in the world.
In 1929, Ferrari founded the Scuderia Ferrari, a private team that served as Alfa Romeo’s racing arm. (Literally, scuderia means stable, as in a stable of talent, or a team.) Headquarters was a two-story stone building on Viale Trento e Trieste. Enzo moved into the apartment above with his new wife, a peasant woman named Laura. He won his last race in 1931. The following January, Laura gave birth to a boy the couple called Dino. Ferrari declared that he would never race again. He had an heir, and he devoted himself to creating a legacy that would live beyond him.
Ferrari believed the winning formula was 50 percent car, 50 percent driver. As for cars, he had armed himself with a fleet of red Alfa Romeos designed by the man who had emerged as Italy’s foremost mechanical maestro, Vittorio Jano. What the scuderia needed was a star at the wheel.
“The Flying Mantuan” Tazio Nuvolari was a man of few words, but his jutting jaw and cold eyes screamed of valor and defiance. Nuvolari combined precise skill with what Ferrari called “near superhuman courage.” He was, by many estimates, the greatest racing driver in the world—ever. Ferrari negotiated a deal that paid the Mantuan almost a third of the scuderia’s income. It would prove a stroke of genius.
Once, during a prerace practice, Ferrari passengered with Nuvolari. “At the first bend,” he later remembered, “I had the clear sensation that we would end up in a ditch; I felt myself stiffen as I waited for the crunch. Instead, we found ourselves on the next straight with the car in a perfect position. I looked at Nuvolari. His rugged face was calm, just as it always was, and certainly not the face of someone who had just escaped a hair-raising spin. I had the same sensation in the second bend. By the fourth or fifth bend, I began to understand. I had noticed that through the entire bend Tazio did not lift his foot from the accelerator, and that, in fact, it was flat on the floor.”
In Jano and Nuvolari, Ferrari had prototypes: an engineering mastermind and a champion pilot.* The duo powered the Scuderia Ferrari into the limelight in Italy. During these years “the agitator of men” studied the psychology of winning. Certain principles were self-evident.
Competition is the impetus for innovation. The fiercer the competition, the faster cars will go.
There is in some men a need to achieve greatness. When matched with talent, this necessity can turn humans into demigods.
A man who is willing to die at the wheel is always likely to beat a man in a faster car—if he can survive until the end of the race.
During the 1930s, German chancellor Adolf Hitler began to understand the symbolism behind the Grand Prix car. He offered huge sums of reichsmarks to any German firm that could produce a successful racer. A fleet of “silver arrows” resulted—massive machines from Mercedes and Auto Union. To reduce weight, the Germans stripped the cars of paint so the metal gleamed. Beginning in 1934, the Germans dominated racing, to Hitler’s delight.
In July 1935, Nuvolari and a caravan from the Scuderia Ferrari left Modena and traveled north to the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, one of the first purpose-built closed racing circuits, 14.2 miles of mountainous twists. Nazi storm troopers escorted the cars to the starting grid as two hundred fifty thousand spectators looked on. Everyone believed the German cars to be invincible. The Führer himself was most certainly listening in by radio. The silver arrows lapped at outrageous speeds with swastikas painted on their bodies. The red Alfas had on their fuselages the black Prancing Horse against a yellow shield.
Manfred Von Brauchitsch, nephew of a high-ranking Nazi official, led the race in a Mercedes-Benz. But Nuvolari hunted him down. As the racers tore into the last lap and the crowds looked on amazed, a voice piped over the loudspeakers:
“Brauchitsch has burst a tire! Nuvolari has passed him! Brauchitsch is trying to catch up on a flat tire!”
At home in Modena, Ferrari’s phone rang. He heard the news: Nuvolari had won the German Grand Prix. In Italy, racing was a passion that joined all classes in every region; entire cities erupted in celebration. Ferrari’s reputation was cemented. The Prancing Horse came to represent not just a man and his cars, but a nation.
Ferrari built his factory in Maranello during World War II to produce machine tools. Surrounded by empty fields, it consisted of three rows of shed-like buildings shaped in a triangle with a cobblestone courtyard. An eerie calm marked those first months. It was interrupted in November 1944 by American bombers, who pummeled Ferrari’s factory. By the summer of 1945, the violence had begun to subside and the factory was patched up. Plans for the first Ferrari car were in the works.
That winter, Ferrari received an unexpected guest. Luigi Chinetti was a towering figure in European racing circles. He was a two-time Le Mans champion, driving Alfa Romeos on both occasions. Chinetti’s path had taken a
n unexpected turn. Strongly antifascist, he’d escaped Europe on the eve of the war. He’d signed on as chief technician in the French champion René Dreyfus’s expedition to Indianapolis. Dreyfus, an officer in the French army, competed in a Maserati at the Indy 500 on May 30, 1940, with Chinetti working the pit. That same week, 350,000 troops were evacuated from Dunkirk. Chinetti defected and ended up in New York, where he was employed at J. S. Inskip’s Rolls-Royce dealership.
Now he was back in Europe to see what was left of his past. He found his friend Ferrari shivering in an overcoat in the old scuderia office. The room was ice cold and dimly lit, a single bulb hanging from a chord from the ceiling. Chinetti was an American citizen now, and he described what he had found in the new world. Roads were filled with big Detroit cars, but the sports car did not exist. There was no such thing. Chinetti had an idea: Ferrari should build cars and sell them in America.
“The future is here, Ferrari,” he said of his adopted country. “You must believe that here sports cars will be a gold mine. There is hunger for motor sport. The market is virgin. There is plenty of money. The potential is immense.”
Ferrari agreed—if Chinetti was willing to put up the money. Chinetti returned to New York and set up shop in a small garage on West 49th Street. Without a car to sell, he declared Ferrari open for business.
It took Ferrari nearly two years to build the first car. In postwar Europe, electricity was a luxury. Fuel and manpower were in short supply. Ferrari chose a V12 for the layout of his first engine. “All we wanted to do was to build a conventional engine,” he later recalled, “only one that would be outstanding.” In truth, the engine was hardly conventional. Its twelve cylinders were the diameter of silver dollars, designed to rev at very high speeds. The first Ferrari—the 125—debuted in a race at Piacenza on May 11, 1947. Its first victory came two weeks later at the Rome Grand Prix.
As America’s Marshall Plan dollars flooded Europe’s economy, Ferrari hurled himself into the postwar racing scene. In 1948, Ferrari cars won the 12 Hours of Paris, the Mille Miglia, the Targa Florio. A year later, France announced that it would hold the most prestigious of all races again after a nine-year hiatus—the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The first postwar Le Mans was won by Luigi Chinetti and his teammate, Lord Selsdon of England, in a Ferrari 166 MM, a roadster nicknamed barchetta (“little boat”). In a truly heroic display of endurance, Chinetti drove all but a few laps over the twenty-four hours (his teammate Selsdon is rumored to have been drunk). The win triggered an instant demand for Ferrari cars across the continent.
The only cars Ferrari had to sell were battle-scarred racers. But by 1949, he began offering customers touring cars in small numbers. Chinetti made his first sales. The first Ferrari arrived in the United States in June 1949; the buyer was Briggs Cunningham of Connecticut, the renowned yachting champion and soon-to-be racing driver and constructor. Chinetti understood that his customer had to be special. Not just anyone could buy a Ferrari. The car would be defined in part by the man who sat in it.
Ferrari funneled every lire into the racing campaign. Money was tight, and the business model demanded that races be won. Why would a wealthy sportsman buy a Ferrari if a Jaguar had proved the finer machine on the track? It was survival of the fastest. Chinetti began funneling cash back to Italy, feeding the operation with a transatlantic umbilical cord. Nothing like a Ferrari had ever graced American roads. They were cars built by Italian artisans, every detail down to the steering wheel handcrafted using some of the same methods used to make Roman suits of armor and the royal carriages of the ancient kingdoms.
Three years after launching his company, Enzo Ferrari was poised to dominate racing in Europe. His first Grand Prix championships came back to back in 1952 and 1953. Another Le Mans victory came in 1954. Years later Ferrari was asked: Which of his cars was his favorite? He answered, “The car which I have not yet created.” And which of his victories meant the most? “The one which I have not yet achieved.”
On December 2, 1956, six months after the death of his son, Ferrari held the first meeting of his new Grand Prix team at the Modena Autodrome. The mile-long track was carved out on the outskirts of town, roughly rectangular and flat, with a row of dilapidated pits that looked like an elongated bus shelter.
Hidden behind sunglasses, Ferrari greeted members of his new team—seven protagonists from all over Europe, each a national hero in his country.* Unlike Ferrari himself, his drivers personified the cars. They were young, aggressive, and impossibly handsome, all of them from money, for only the rich would have experience in performance cars. Here stood Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, the twenty-eight-year-old Marquis de Portago of Spain. Cigarette dangling, in need of a shave, he was audacity incarnate. “I like the feeling of fear,” de Portago said in an interview that year. “After a while you become an addict and have to have it.” In another interview: “Making love is the most important thing I do every day.” Also mingling was Count Wolfgang Von Trips, nobleman of Germany. He was a Formula One rookie and would soon garner the nickname Count Von Crash.
A new season was about to begin. In Italy, the press baptized Ferrari’s team Il Squadra Primavera—the Spring Team. The name would sadly prove ironic. One of the seven men would retire within days. All six others would be killed, all of them in high-speed crashes.
Meanwhile, at the Ferrari factory, Vittorio Jano was at work building a new racing engine, designed during those late-night meetings at Dino Ferrari’s deathbed. Early dynamometer testing began before the year was out. In Ferrari’s own words, a new six-cylinder engine the world would know as the Dino was about to “burst into song.”
3
Total Performance: Ford Motor Company, 1963
You go to a big football game. Say there are 100,000 people there. But not one of them wants to buy a goddamn football. You go to an automobile race and there they are—all your potential customers.
—Ford racing executive JACQUE PASSINO
ON THE MORNING of February 24, 1963, beneath a blanket of Florida storm clouds, thousands of men, women, and children funneled through turnstiles and shuffled to their seats at the Daytona International Speedway. Detroit auto men turned up in droves. Henry II’s brother Benson parted the hordes and took his seat trackside.
The 1963 Daytona 500 was America’s first major speed competition following Henry II’s withdrawal from Detroit’s Safety Resolution. The publicity machine was in high gear. “A bitter controversy—beyond the point of intense sales competition—appears to be brewing in America’s automobile industry,” commented the Los Angeles Times. “Maybe today’s race will touch off total war within the domestic car building ranks.”
In the paddock, newspapermen could be seen peering under the hoods of a fleet of Ford Galaxie 500s, which were painted over with endorsements and racing numbers. There they witnessed for the first time the new Ford 427-cubic-inch V8, the largest, most powerful Ford production engine ever. No one at the time could imagine the impact this 427 would have in the world of speed and the future of the global car industry. General Motors—publicly an antiracing stalwart—had decided to stand by the Safety Resolution. Still, insiders believed the man behind the privately entered Chevrolets, Smokey Yunick, had his pockets lined with Detroit dollars. It was all a smokescreen. Yunick turned up with his own 427-cubic-inch Chevrolet engines. As the start neared, the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, warming Daytona’s 2.5 miles of storied pavement.
This was American racing: an oval superspeedway and modified stock American cars, a perfect marriage between sport and industry. Swelled with cash, garnering larger and larger headlines, NASCAR basked in the Florida sunlight. Ford entered fourteen cars, and private teams entered fourteen General Motors cars. In the jostling for talent, Ford had signed a handful of first-rate oval racers—Fred Lorenzen, Ned Jarrett, and Dan Gurney. The Chevrolet and Pontiac lineups included A. J. Foyt, Fireball Roberts, and Junior Johnson.
By the time the pace car was leading the field of f
ifty gleaming stockers around the oval, 71,000 fans had begun to drain the speedway of its beer. In backyards and garages all over the United States, fathers and sons were tuning in by radio. The green flag gave way to an explosion of engines, and the fans followed the speeding metal around and around.
With fifteen laps to go, the crowd was treated to a breathtaking spectacle. Three Fords ran at the front in a tight pack, slipstreaming into the banked turns. Their chrome bumpers were inches apart, moving well over 160 mph. DeWayne “Tiny” Lund, a 270-pounder from South Carolina, was leading on the last lap when he ran out of gas in the final turn. His Ford coughed and wheezed and the engine fell silent just as he rolled over the finish line in first place, followed by four other Fords.
Down at Victory Lane, Lund clutched Miss Florida under his arm and smiled for the cameras, the trophy sitting atop his Ford behind him, his wallet $23,350 thicker. Henry II’s brother Benson headed for a pay phone.
It was Iacocca’s job to turn success on the racetrack into success at the showrooms. If ever there was a time to do what he did best—sell—it was now.
Within days of the Daytona win, 2,800 newspapers featured advertisements that read: “In the open test that tears them apart—the Daytona 500—Ford’s durability conquered the field: first, second, third, fourth and fifth.” Ford’s army of public relations men received a thirty-nine-page pamphlet on how to translate wins into sales. “Ford Motor Companies around the world have committed extensive resources to prove openly, dramatically, and conclusively on the international road and track circuit that its products are superior to those of its competitors,” the internal document began. “The purpose is to help sell more Ford cars. Your job as a public relations man. . .”
