Enzo Ferrari: turning weakness into success

The reasons for the attraction were not particularly obvious. He was neither handsome nor charming nor outgoing. A ropey racing driver, he had only a rudimentary grasp of engineering, yet his preferred title was Ingegnere.

He described himself as an 'agitator of men'. He called it creative tension. That was shorthand for: an unhealthy delight in intrigue, clandestine meetings and gossip, particularly of the salacious sort, plus stored slights, perceived or real, and treating people, including his spies, with studied indifference once their usefulness had worn thin - and often before.

In his defence, he was democratic in the last such respect: royalty, minor or otherwise, stars of stage, screen and sport - particularly racing drivers - millionaire industrialists and famous musicians all came in for the same treatment. Yet still they came - even His Holiness John Paul II.

Enzo Anselmo Ferrari was an enigma. Increasingly reclusive, he showed great wisdom by parcelling his meagre personal resource so parsimoniously. The less he did, the more his devotees filled in the gaps. By retreating deeper into the umbra - the last race he attended was the 1957 Modena Grand Prix - the brighter his light shone. Those impenetrable sunglasses, the moodily lit office, the diminuendo and crescendo of muttered utterances and improbable proclamations - there was method (acting) to his madness.

Nuvolari (second from right) and Enzo (second from left) had team success © LAT

It wasn't all style. There was substance too. When his father and elder brother died young and in jarring chronological proximity, Enzo pulled his head from the clouds - he had dabbled at opera and sports journalism - to become the head of a family with more aspiration than inspiration, more sense than money: its metalwork firm had gone bust.

Young Enzo's tears, shed on a Turin park bench after Fiat turned him away, were genuine as well as theatrical. A small fish in a big pond, it was sink or swim.

So he made himself useful in lots of little ways. He set up an unassuming workshop in Modena and worked grandiosely within while living modestly above. He courted the emerging Alfa Romeo marque and became its agent for Emilia-Romagna. And he networked. Oh, how he networked. Ferrari - the Modenese equivalent of 'Smith' - forged innumerable relationships and provided the link in many criss-crossing chains.

He also fulfilled his ambition to become a racing driver. But despite finishing second in the 1920 Targa Florio and winning the '24 Coppa Acerbo at Pescara, both with Alfa Romeo, he would subsequently feel the need to embroider a career that began to come unravelled when he slipped away, allegedly ill, rather than drive an ultra-competitive Alfa Romeo P2 at the ultra-competitive 1924 French GP. Though he rarely voiced them, Enzo knew his limits.

Tazio Nuvolari, the driver by whom he would measure all others, regularly reminded him, in jest and anger, about his moderate driving ability. Whereupon Ferrari would gleefully, or spitefully - theirs was a combustible relationship - refer to the unedifying collapse of Scuderia Nuvolari.

It was with the creation of his eponymous team in readiness for 1930 that Ferrari found his niche - and created a template for future generations. He spotted a gap in the market, created by hard-pressed manufacturers' exodus from an increasingly expensive sport, found the necessary funding and made it work by providing Alfa Romeo, and for a brief time Rudge motorcycles, with a cheap conduit for success and a bulwark against costly failure.

Ferrari gave up on Le Mans after 1973 appearance © LAT

He did so thanks to hard-won financial support from his rich and racy clients and favoured, faithful (and grateful) suppliers: Shell, Pirelli, Bosch and Weber carburettors. This joint-stock team's success - plus an enlightening recce lap alongside Nuvolari - convinced Ferrari that his driving days were over. This he confirmed when his first son was born in January 1932.

The Wagnerian arrival of the Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union GP teams in 1934 - and later the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe in and above Italy - also caused Enzo major shifts. The inevitable failure to keep pace with them cost him Nuvolari, who joined Auto Union in '38, and his team; Alfa Romeo, at the urging of Il Duce Benito Mussolini, bought him out while retaining him as team manager, a sop that proved Ferrari, sacked in '39, was a born employer rather than employee. Thus, when Scuderia Ferrari was resurrected in Maranello in '42, it was in the guise of a privately owned company.

Come hell or high water, come Ford, come Fiat - oh, the irony of it - there could be only one boss. Enzo, having survived the war and the bombing of his factory, was nearing 50. He had no time to waste.

Not that he didn't need, or felt that he deserved, help. Having "killed his mother" - the theatrical response to Froilan Gonzalez's defeat of Alfa Romeo at the 1951 British GP (an odd reaction given that this was also Ferrari's maiden world championship victory) - and won back-to-back world titles thanks to the flexibility of his foundry's output alloyed to the remorseless speed of Alberto Ascari, Enzo's team was in disarray by the mid-50s.

Had it not been for the gift - from the country via bankrupt Lancia - of six technically advanced D50s, plus its designer Vittorio Jano (an old sparring partner), driver Eugenio Castellotti, a transporter and a wealth of spares in late 1955, he might have gone under. Enzo, of course, thanked nobody.

He was lording it by now, making unreasonable demands and stamping his foot, pitting driver against driver because it kept them keen, he felt. His cars were what mattered. They had become a blood-red symbol of glamour, sex and death. The Vatican, purple with outrage, preached against the sinfulness of racing - and made it more popular than ever.

There was a price to pay, however: Ascari and Castellotti, the Hemingway-esque Marquis de Portago, Luigi Musso and Peter Collins were killed in Ferraris during the 1950s. Even promising engineer Andrea Fraschetti perished testing at Modena. Enzo, of course, expressed no remorse. His was a glorious war and casualties were inevitable.

Inherited Lancia D50s saved team in the mid-1950s © LAT

The death of his sickly son Dino, at the age of 24 in 1956, however, was a hammer blow. Enzo, a man of desires and affairs, had lost his one true love, and although he immersed himself in the running of his company, solace was not forthcoming.

Because he had failed to anticipate the rippling side effects of his on-track successes - it was Luigi Chinetti who persuaded him of the influential American market's favourable response to Ferrari's winning of Le Mans - matters were getting out of hand. His public life, what remained of it, and private life with feisty wife Laura and understanding mistress Lina, were a mess. Racing was all he cared about now.

Enter Ford, which wanted 90 per cent of the shooting match. Enzo would have signed, too, but for an approval stipulation concerning his racing budget. After 22 days of talks, he cut them dead. Fiat's coy wooing of him began and Gianni Agnelli, one of the few to whom Enzo went - he even stood up John Paul II - consummated their relationship in 1969.

The 1960s were convulsive for Enzo. He finally conceded to placing the 'ox behind the cart' and going rear-engined. Half of his team jumped ship at the end of 1961, although some came crawling back. His innate understanding of the Italian artisans' craft and their importance to his brand did not stretch to their intransigent unions. And jilted Ford, as vowed, kicked his butt at Le Mans and in F1. No wonder much of the fight left him. What he needed most was a trusted lieutenant.

Ferrari was still at a low ebb when Luca di Montezemolo, scion of an aristocratic Piedmontese family, a graduate in law and international relations, and an occasional ropey rally driver, arrived in 1973. Enzo had a hunch about this young man - di Montezemolo was 25 - since overhearing him expound in Ferrari's defence on a radio phone-in.

He thus allowed him, suave and savvy, more power and room for manoeuvre than any of his preceding team managers. Unlike Eugenio Dragoni, who had shortsightedly schemed to get rid of John Surtees in order to promote Italian drivers, di Montezemolo saw the bigger picture and refused to sugar-coat or twist his reports, which crucially he made directly to Enzo.

Surtees, as well as winning the 1964 world title, had endeavoured to internationalise Ferrari, to inject a British mindset and practices without diluting its Latin soul. He was 30 years too early. Fiat then attempted to carve the racing team in its own image and made things worse.

Spectacular Villeneuve gave Enzo a boost © LAT

With designer Mauro Forghieri, another loyal lieutenant, brought back in from the cold, and Niki Lauda, another to tell it straight to Enzo, on the roster - a deal struck appropriately amid the no-nonsense business bustle of Heathrow - di Montezemolo was able to cut free the sportscar anchor (Le Mans had done its work) and steady and then point Ferrari's F1 ship in the right direction.

Even after his promotion elsewhere within the group in '76, and disaffected Lauda's curt ciao! of '77 after winning his second world title with the Scuderia, Forghieri's brilliant transversale concept was still winning two years later.

None of which had much to do with Enzo. Ill and frail with diabetes, and refusing a simple operation for a hernia, another 10 years seemed beyond him. The arrival of Gilles Villeneuve, a latter-day Nuvolari, was the tonic he needed. Watching his abundantly talented, never-say-die surrogate son struggle in recalcitrant chassis' was a catalyst too.

Nobody had done more for Ferrari than Forghieri, but his ability to design a car from front to back, and then oversee it at the track, had become a hindrance rather than a help in increasingly complex times. So the very English Harvey Postlethwaite was drafted.

As had fellow Englishman Mike Parkes in the 1960s, 'Doc' loved the Italian way of life and immersed himself in it, learning the lingo and speaking it with a passable Modenese dialect. He was dismayed, however, by the malaise he discovered at Maranello. With Enzo's full backing, he introduced the team to new tech - carbonfibre, complete with autoclave, and pullrod suspension - and ensured that aerodynamics was no longer a dirty word. He even got parts made in Belgium and nobody complained.

All this might have been enough in conjunction with Forghieri's excellent V6 turbo had not the interminable politics - long-time team manager Marco Piccinini possessed di Montezemolo's iron fist but not its velvet glove - triggered the sequence of events that led to Villeneuve's fatal accident at Zolder in 1982.

The subsequent lull in results after 1983 eventually opened the door for John Barnard, another Englishman. Able to name his price after guiding McLaren to the sort of dominance Ferrari so craved, he took it to the next level by designing F1 Ferraris in Guildford. Michele Alboreto, the first Italian driver to complete a full season with the Scuderia since Lorenzo Bandini in 1965 - which says a lot - likened it to conducting brain surgery down a phone line.

Barnard was able to introduce paddleshift transmission in this way, and a derivative of his 640 almost won the 1990 world title with Alain Prost - by which time Barnard was with Benetton. He had underestimated Ferrari's theatrics and national pride.

Montezemolo took over from Ferrari © LAT

Enzo's legacy was unsurprisingly strong. He had died, aged 90, in August 1988. Although spiky to the end - his threat to depart F1 went as far as the design, construction, testing and unveiling of an Indycar in 1986 - his was a slow fade in the main.

In his final year, however, he signed off the demolition of his Modena workshop, a true break from the past, and persuaded Fiat to build him a road/racer: the visceral F40. He asked that it be built with passion too: more Ferrari and less Fiat in other words. Looking to a future without him, he had spurred on his Prancing Horse.

But how do you replace an icon? The recoiling Scuderia understandably slumped as it mulled this over. Di Montezemolo, having successfully run the Italia '90 World Cup, came off the bench in 1992: Year Zero, so bad were things at Ferrari. He somehow persuaded Postlethwaite and Barnard to work together - a stopgap, but an impressive one - and employed Jean Todt.

It dawned gradually that Enzo neither could nor should be replaced: keep the creativity and passion, lose the tension. Only then did its past - Ferrari's biggest weakness, according to Lauda - become its keystone rather than millstone. The self-sufficiency engendered by Enzo, though outmanoeuvred for a gallingly long period by nimble British garagisti, ultimately became a homogenised boon when F1 became monolithic.

Once Michael Schumacher's services had been obtained - Ayrton Senna had previously slipped through Montezemolo's grasp - and his Benetton gang reconvened at Maranello, garagisti finally blended with grandee. It took 10 years to work the bad of Enzo's long rein from its system, but when only the good, of which there was much, still remained, Ferrari's mix proved irresistible.

Only now, 25 years after his death, with a more touchy-feely Scuderia deep in its post-Schumacher recovery phase, has Enzo's steely influence softened to fuzzy memory.

Nothing is forever, and no man is bigger than the sport, but none has come closer to being so than this agitator of men, who became great because of his limitations rather than in spite of them.