Enzo Ferrari: A Life
Richard Williams
337pp, Yellow Jersey, £18
If you visit the headquarters of, say, the McLaren F1 team, you are essentially visiting a factory. A very high-tech factory, but a factory nevertheless. If, however, you visit the headquarters of the Ferrari team, the Scuderia, you are not at a factory but at a shrine.
In the middle of the pista Fiorano, Ferrari's private testing circuit near Maranello, stands a farmhouse. On the ground floor, Enzo Ferrari kept his office. It is virtually unchanged from the day he died, in 1988, at the age of 90.
In a nation where the romance of motor-racing and the sports car is a kind of secular religion, Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Ferrari were the original trinity. But the greatest of these was Ferrari, and the reason was simple: Enzo Ferrari himself. Ferrari's career spanned the century, from motorsport's earliest days of amateur heroics on unmade roads in the 1920s, through the postwar revival of the 1950s and glamour of the 1960s, to the virtual rocket science of F1 cars in the 1990s.
It is a tale that Richard Williams, familiar to Guardian readers as chief sports writer and to motorsport fans for his books The Death of Ayrton Senna and Racers, is highly qualified to tell. He has even driven the entire route of the 1957 Mille Miglia (once upon a time the great challenge for aspiring racing drivers). In an Alfa Romeo, too, the lucky bastard.
As Williams describes, Ferrari's genius was to run a successful manufacturing business alongside the racing team. The lustre of the Scuderia's sporting prowess was the company's greatest marketing tool: provided you could afford one of Enzo's machines, with their prancing horse insignia and red livery, you could drive the dream.
Yet the racing was always his passion. It is hard to name a great driver who did not race for Ferrari: Nuvolari, Ascari, Fangio, Hawthorn and Collins - the list goes on. But so does the list of fatalities. Small wonder Enzo had a depressive streak: he expected total commitment and he drove his drivers, sometimes it could be said, to their deaths. As Ferrari's first American driver, Phil Hill remarked ruefully of his departure from the team in 1962: "I wasn't his type, not gung-ho enough. I wasn't willing to die for Enzo Ferrari."
There are black-and-white photographs, but not enough of them. I lost the plot at times amid the blitz of drivers' and engineers' names and the welter of different engine sizes and model types: some more faces to those names, and some sleek red cars, would have helped.
Despite fascinating glimpses of the inner man, this is not a psychological study. Ferrari is the story's instigator, yet remains aloof and inscrutable. As handsomely crafted as everything Williams does, and as well-informed, this is an enthusiast's biography. But Ferrari will never lack devotees.
