Ferrari: The Man And The Machine

Book: Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine
Author: Brock Yates

As a boy, Enzo Ferrari dreamed of three careers: sportswriting, opera singing, and race driving. He did dabble in sportswriting and race driving. In the end, he didn’t make his mark in any of them. Instead, he ended up with a monomaniacal focus on racing in the Grand Prix, and that’s where he entered into the pantheon of larger-than-life figures who mark a zeitgeist.

He was not born in poverty, but he was decidedly of a lower middle-class stock. Given that he was not of nobility, his desire to serve in the artillery division in WWI was denied, and he ended up shoeing mules in the Italian army. He got injured, and as he lay recovering in a chilly, darkened room on the second floor of a building, he could hear the steady clatter of workmen’s hammers as the lids of coffins were pounded into place. This time, in 1918, when he was around 19, is when, for some mysterious reason, he decided to get into cars for a career. He tried joining Fiat. It was the end of the war, and there were many thousands of veterans looking for a job, many more skilled and higher in the social pecking order. Enzo Ferrari did not get the job, and in his own telling, sat down on a park bench and cried. He then moved into racing for a career.

The next twenty years were a heady time in Italy. The Fascists were on the rise, and so was motor racing. Motor racing, one learns, was the most popular sport in Italy and large parts of Europe. It was one sport where the rich could mingle with the poor, and death visited all. In Italy, motorsports crossed all social boundaries, rivaling football and cycling in popularity. Mussolini, Il Duce, had some passing interest in the sport. Alfa Romeo was the Italian racehorse then, and the government offered financial inducements to keep Alfa Romeo powerful in international Grand Prix competition in the name of Italian prestige.

Ferrari started by racing Alfa Romeos himself. At some point, he realized he would never be a master and so set up a stable of Alfa Romeos that he could enter into races by hiring more talented drivers. There were some wins, many losses, and lots of haggling with Alfa Romeo, who fielded their own racing team. Fiat dropped out of the racing business. New ones entered it - the Maseratis, Bugatti, Mercedes, and Auto Union of the Germans being the most notable. The Germans had the backing of the state and they had the best technology on the market. They beat the Alfas handily before WW2 put an end to all racing. It was around this time that Enzo Ferrari decided to build his own cars. After some war profiting, he finally managed to field some of his beautiful machines in 1947. The engine was from Ferrari engineers, the body was from elsewhere. From then on, it was constant improvement and keeping up with advances others came up with.

Ferrari was in his 50s then, with decided ideas about what would win races - it all came down to the engine at the front of the car. No noteworthy innovation came from Scuderia Ferrari. It almost always came from the Germans, the British, and the Americans, tried and tested on the track a few times, before Ferrari, kicking and screaming, could be convinced to try it. So it was that rear engines, space-age bodywork, coil-spring suspensions, independent suspensions, magnesium wheels, and disc brakes all came from elsewhere, many from the British. Only one significant alteration in engineering philosophy had come from Ferrari in all the years of business: the switch to a large-displacement, naturally aspirated engine.

So while Ferrari was trying to win races, barely keeping up with the competition, he still had to make money. Starting money from races and sponsorship was not enough. The passenger car effort - selling cars to the newly rich, dissolute nobles, playboys - was only a means to keep the money flowing into racing. His focus, always, was on racing. He had also become by this time very stuck to his hometown of Modena. All business negotiations had to happen there, with everyone stopping by his bare office and big desk to seek a deal. He rarely made public appearances, and did not visit the races his cars entered, all of which added to his mystique. The American press, always up for the creation of new celebrities, made him into a demigod. His passenger cars were selling at enormous margins, and he looked at his buyers, mainly the Americans, with contempt.

This did not stop him from being almost bankrupt, however. There was a brief dalliance with Ford about buying the passenger car business. That fell through because Ferrari wanted to run Scuderia Ferrari and race cars. Ford did not want the competition. Ferrari could not race if Ford entered the races. So the deal fell through. On paper, the deal was for 17 million or so dollars. Not much. Nationalism was rampant in all of European racing. The cars still carried the colors of their native states: Italians red, British green, French blue, Germans silver, Belgians yellow, and so on. Numerous companies, including Dunlop, the English tire company, Michelin from France, and Continental from Germany, were reluctant to do business with any team that was not composed of fellow countrymen.

So the idea of an American corporation buying Ferrari made enough noise in the Italian press that Fiat entered into an agreement to purchase Ferrari and, what’s more, on his terms. He would continue racing. Ferrari made sure to note that this was revenge for rejecting him almost 50 years earlier.

It's always great to read a biography where the author is not intimidated by the subject, nor hopelessly star-struck. Yates demolishes the aura around Enzo Ferrari right from the get-go, showing in no uncertain terms that Ferrari was neither an engineer nor a race car driver of note. What he was was a man of enormous ego, capable of holding a grudge for any perceived slight, and focused on one thing and one thing only: success on the race track. Not any race track, but the Grand Prix. This focus meant that he stuck around long enough for his competitors to drop out - the Fiats, Alfa Romeos, the Auto Unions, the Mercedeses, Maseratis. Just showing up every day clearly has its benefits, especially if one has had a long life like Ferrari. He did not care about the many, many dead drivers, not family (and especially not his wife), not his mistresses, not even the road cars that clearly subsidized his racing. He did not care about politics or religion, and rode over both the fascist tide and the socialist wave that followed World War II. All that mattered was the prize, and his reputation for winning. His special skill, aside from the focus, seems to have been his ability to "agitate men" to create and drive his machines. He possessed an unerring sense of whom to bully and whom to accommodate. He was a workaholic, in his workshops all seven days a week, including holidays - he worked on both Easter Sunday and Christmas.

Brock Yates is very opinionated. Couple that with the fact that he can write, makes this a very entertaining book, even if all the races at some point begin to resemble each other, a medley of deaths, crashes, and newer competitors rising from the ashes. Consider this assessment of the early 20th-century Italian middle class:

The family unit was sacred to the Italian male of Ferrari’s generation, within, of course, the rather wide latitudes defined exclusively by the man himself—who remained free to philander, spend freely and ignore the tenets of the Church, while in turn demanding goose-stepping obedience from his children and saintly fidelity from his wife. He adored his children, and treated his wife as a basically asexual helpmate modeled on the most perfect female of all time—his mother. Mothers were worshipped, wives tolerated and other women treated as objects of either scorn or lust, or both.

And this:

Mussolini never enjoyed the goose-stepping enthusiasm accorded Hitler by the Germans. He faced a solid anti-Fascist coalition of old royalists, socialists, academics and a strong Communist Party centered in the industrial north. To his credit, and directly opposed to the inhuman actions of Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini did not incite pogroms against his opposition and precious few of his opponents were killed or incarcerated.

On the status-starved Americans, who wanted Ferraris despite it being of inferior build quality:

By now the image of Enzo Ferrari had been inflated to mystical dimensions. His adoring customers accepted him as an imperious but lovable artisan laboring with monklike devotion over his beloved machines. Little did the provincials know that he had been prepared to unceremoniously dump the road-car business not once but three times within the past few years and was now engaged in a serious attempt to establish strong financial relations with Fiat.

On why Ferrari did not show any emotion at the races:

His view of racing remained constant: the event itself was essentially meaningless. For him the stimulation came in the planning and preparation, in the creation of the machines, in the organization of the human beings who would man the team and in the endless wrangling with the press, promoters and sponsors. For Enzo Ferrari the race was over when the engines were fired and the cars leapt away from the starting grid. From then on it was in the hands of his drivers and there was nothing for him to do but to ease back in his chair.

Great book.