The Ferrari

Years ago I was looking at three cars in the Ferrari pits at Sebring. It had rained in the afternoon and the Florida sun, dropping to the rim of the great plain, shone red in the black pools of water on the circuit. There were only a few cars running in practice, howling separately in the distance, out of sight most of the time. The blood-red Ferrari cars would go a few laps as soon as the mechanics finished with them. These were stark, open two-seaters. Their paint was flat and crude. The bucket seats were upholstered in wide-wale corduroy. Everything else in the cars except the wood-rimmed steering wheels was bare unpainted metal, much of it roughly finished. Heavy weld-seams joined the thin tubes of the frames. Shiny streaks here and there showed where oil had been mopped up. A man next to me turned, remembering the old pilots' gag: "You wouldn't send the kid up in that!" he said. A small, dark, red-eyed mechanic got into one of the cars. An ignition key looped in a piece of sisal wrapping twine stuck out of the dashboard. He leaned on it with the heel of his hand and a bare-metal clanging and clattering began. You wanted to move away before the thing exploded. It fired suddenly, all of a piece, and pumped out a gout of blue smoke that drifted low over the wet grass of the infield. The mechanic sat there with his foot on it for five minutes. There was somebody in each of the other cars, and they were running, too. Juan Manuel Fangio materialized, pear-shaped in a rain jacket. He looked sleepy, he looked bored, he looked indifferent, until one noticed the incessant flickering of his eyes. The mechanic yelled something into his ear. Fangio let him see a sad smile, he shrugged massively. He got into the automobile, stared briefly at the instruments and then he went away and the other two, Eugenio Castelotti and Luigi Musso, howled after him, down the straight and under the bridge and around the corner out of sight. We could hear them through the esses and into the Warehouse road and then not again until they showed up on the back straight, the three of them in echelon astern, the howling of the engines squeezed down by distance to a thin buzz, their progress across the horizon apparently so leisurely that you wondered why this should be called racing. They were running around 140 mph. They went down through the gears for the hairpin turn, a 180-degree reversal, the rear wheels spinning or trying to, and then suddenly they were in the hole (continued on page 52)

Ferrari(continued from page 49) at the bottom of the finishing straight, drifting up to the edge of the concrete, coming past the pits, Fangio first, sitting there limp as pasta, then Castelotti, then Musso, all of them turning 7000 revolutions a minute and then one after the other they shifted up a gear, three successive explosive whacks as the engines bit, and they were gone again. They ran over the five-mile circuit a dozen times like that, tight together, so stable they seemed locked to the ground like buildings, but flying past light as deer at the same time. Wet with rain, the hurried-on paint glistened like oven-fired enamel as the cars screamed down the shiny concrete chute, the drivers sitting back from the wheels, their arms straight. These were beautiful objects, perfect of their kind, there was nothing of crudity or starkness about them now. It was hard to believe that any of the other sixty cars that would start the race the next day could run ahead of the red Ferraris, and none of them did.

Enzo Ferrari of Italy may make a dozen such cars a year, full racing cars, Grand Prix cars, now that the times have swung away from the so-called big sports cars, and he will make 350 or 400 passenger cars for the entire world market. His clients will wait from three to eighteen months for delivery and they will pay from $12,600 to $17,800 per car. Some of them, perhaps wishing something out of the ordinary, may find it politic or necessary to go to Modena to see Il Commendatore Ferrari. They may wait an hour for an audience. They may wait three days. After all, these may be the best automobiles in the world, and not many of them are made. Sometimes desirable possessions must be paid for in more than money.

Since he began to build motorcars, in 1947, under his own name and the black prancing horse that is his trademark, Enzo Ferrari has laid down about forty models of sports and Grand Prix cars and about forty passenger models, properly gran turismo or "fast touring" cars. There is no annual or seasonal model change. The Ferrari catalog is changed when the Commendatore thinks a change is due, and not before and not afterward. At the moment, six models are offered, some of them rather tentatively. They are the 250 Granturismo coupe, with body by Pininfarina, $12,600 in New York. This, one of the most enchanting automobiles ever built, will be discontinued and replaced with a four-passenger coupe on the same chassis, also by Pininfarina, also selling for $12,600. This is the first four-passenger car Ferrari has made. The Berlinetta, slightly better suited to competitive use than the 250 GT, has a shorter wheelbase, the same engine in a higher state of tune, and a body by Scaglietti, who specializes in lightness. All three of these use essentially the same engine, a 12-cylinder, 3-liter (180-inch) specimen which some authorities consider the most nearly perfected high-performance engine in the world. The models Super America and Super Fast, built to order only, use bigger 12-cylinder engines, one of 4.1 liters, one 4.9, or as big as a Studebaker V-8. These are 170-mph cars and they cost a minimal $17,800. Extant as a prototype with body by Bertone is a small car, with a 1000-cubic-centimeter, 75-horsepower engine, called the "mitra" (machine-gun) by the factory people, or the "Ferrarina." The car has been tentatively priced at $4500.

The new car will be fast for its size, but it will of course not be comparable with the standard model. A Ferrari 250 GT will do, depending on gearing, from around 125 miles an hour to around 150. So will a Chevrolet Corvette, for one third the price. The Ferrari will accelerate from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 6.0 seconds, the Corvette in 6.6. Is six-tenths of a second worth $8000? Hardly. Is the Ferrari's road-holding better? Yes, but the difference is critical only in the uppermost ranges, where few drivers are capable of going, areas no one should enter on an open road in this country.

Is the Ferrari better made? Probably, since it is largely made by individual men working with individual machines and micrometers, but against this must be laid the incomparable General Motors experience and the easy availability of Chevrolet parts. A windshield wiper-arm can fall off a Ferrari, too.

Is the Ferrari esthetically superior to the Corvette? Here I think there is little room for discussion. Ferrari Granturismo coachwork is from the hand of Pinin Farina, whose firm is now officially Pininfarina, and the bodies are chaste and beautiful, simple, unadorned. They are full of enchantments for the eye. For example, seen from the driver's seat, the hood of the GT is not a flat expanse of metal, dull to the view. Two tunnel-like effects run along the side of the hood, to culminate in the headlights, and Farina has contrived to make them appear to be, not parallel, but converging strongly, thus creating the illusion that the hood is not only narrower than it is in fact, but that it comes to a directing point. Is it worth $8000, then, to have a car beautifully appointed, cunningly made comfortable for the passengers, and appearing to the onlooker so conservative in line and unspectacular in ornament that only the sophisticated will recognize it as an imported high-performance automobile? Yes – for some tastes, a few, this is worth $8000. For most, no.

What, then? Why pay $12,600 for a 250 GT, $17,800 for a Super America?

To buy the only thing of its kind in the world, of course.

The Corvette, the Aston Martin DB4, the 5000 Maserati, the Alfa-Romeo and the Mercedes-Benz 300SL are comparable with the Ferrari in speed, in roadability, in interior comfort. In a lower category, only because they have not been demonstrated in competition, are the Chrysler 300G and the Chrysler-engined Facel-Vega of France. What sets the Ferrari distinctly apart from these seven great motorcars? Breeding and greatness, beauty and performance. Sitting beside the curb, moving away from a stop light, many cars look as good as a Ferrari, but when the last 24-Hour race was run at Le Mans, six of the first seven cars to finish were Ferraris. When the 1000-Kilometer Race of Paris was run this year, Ferrari 250 GTs came across the line first, second, third, fourth and fifth. These were not racing cars, they were passenger cars that anyone can buy. Stirling Moss won the last Tourist Trophy in a 250 Berlinetta, running merrily around the course with the radio playing. The ability of Ferrari components to take the pounding of long-distance, big-money European road races sets the car apart from every other automobile in the world. The formulae of weight-distribution and geometry and springing that keep the car hanging limpet-like under maximum power to a rain-soaked Alpine road set it apart. Luigi Chinetti, the American distributor for Ferrari, remarked to me that he liked the balance of the four-passenger Ferrari better than the Granturismo, citing the fact that he had been able to make the run from Geneva to Paris over a rainy night at an average of 75 mph without often running faster than 100, when in the GT he had to use 112 mph a good deal of the time and 125 occasionally in order to make that average.

I consider Chinetti to be objective, and his judgment in such matters must be regarded as definitive: he is among the greatest long-distance drivers who ever sat in an automobile. He has won the Le Mans 24-Hour race twice, in 1932 with Raymond Sommer, in 1949 with Lord Selsdon. In 1949 he and Selsdon won the Spa 24-Hour race as well, and in 1948 the Paris 12-Hour. In 1951, driving with Piero Taruffi, he won the Carrera Panamericana, a race over the length of Mexico.

Every owner of a fast car is used to hearing the skeptical, "Yes, but where can you use that kind of speed in this country?" One answer is, "You'd be surprised where you can use it." Another might say that having that kind of performance in reserve is something like having a lot of money in the bank: it (continued on page 128)Ferrari (continued from page 52) contributes pleasantly to your sense of security even if you don't wear it in your hatband.

And this kind of traveling can be done in easy comfort, in an esthetically lovely carriage, the best of Italian bodywork covering a chassis so tough and capable that a day and a night of flat-out whip-and-spur running will not begin to overstress it.

A 1961 250 GT engine has no choke. To start it from cold you switch on an electric fuel pump to fill up the three big carburetors. (The pump is also an insurance against vapor-lock in hot weather.) When the clicking has stopped you can shut it off, twist the key and the engine will start with its characteristic metallic rasping. Once the 12 cylinders have begun to fire, a discreet nudge on the accelerator pedal now and again for the first thirty seconds will keep everything turning at a decent 1500 revolutions per minute or so and thereafter the engine will run steadily until it's warm. You can hurry the warm-up by winding up a shutter in front of the radiator. The engine will idle around 700 and you can put the transmission into first gear and let out the clutch at that rate and the car will move off like a Cadillac.

The GT Ferrari is so soft that it is possible to motor an elderly innocent around town on a shopping tour all afternoon without the car's once demonstrating any essential dissimilarity with a Cadillac. (All Ferraris now have four-or five-speed stick-shift transmissions. Although it is absolutely necessary for competitive driving today, the manual transmission will eventually be obsolete. I'll be stoned for saying this, but I look forward to the inevitable automatic-transmission Ferrari. That, I think, will be the ultimate piston-engine automobile.) It is this characteristic, perhaps more than any other, that is astonishing in a car capable of out-performing anything else in the world. One is reminded of Dan Mannix' descriptions of the feats possible to virtuosi among Roman animal-trainers, who could school a lion to retrieve a shot hare, accept a pat in reward, then kill a bear or a man and come back to be patted again. The 250 GT Ferrari is a trained and tamed lion.

However, it is certainly not everybody's lion. A driver coming to a Ferrari from a schooling only on high-powered domestic passenger cars, Corvettes and Chrysler 300s excluded, should proceed with care. He will find that speedometer readings of 70 and 80 come up frequently on roads over which he has previously held himself to 50 mph, and 100 is likely to appear to be merely quick, not really adventuresome. Why's this? Because everything about the car is smooth and quiet: the engine, until it gets up around 5000 and begins to rave, the steering, the Porsche synchromesh transmission, and the ride – smoother the faster the car moves.

Extremely deceiving to the driver newly acquainted with such things is the Ferrari's flat ride. There is minimal roll in corners and curves, and sometimes there seems almost to have been a repeal of the law of gravity, because one's tendency is to stay put while the car corners, instead of bobbing from side to side. Up to rates of speed illegal in every county in the land, there are no mainroad curves in a Ferrari's path. The car irons them all out straight. The driver used to gauging speed by seat-of-the-pants reaction in curves will be deceived to the point of wondering if the speed-ometer is wild.

The Ferrari's brakes contribute to the deception. They are servo-assisted Dunlop disks, and they will, under severe usage, produce the sensation that the car has run into a wall of dough. In ordinary practice they'll pull the speed down precipitately and unobtrusively.

All of these things that I have talked about as deceptive for a new driver are enchantments for one used to the car. A trip I make frequently, and count quickly done in seventy minutes, I did in fifty-five in a GT Ferrari, under a sluicing rain, and without anything spectacular to call attention to myself. Only in a car like this is it possible safely to go quickly from point to point: without prodigious acceleration and braking-power and impeccable road-holding it is dangerous and silly really to hurry.

You can hurry in the 250 GT Ferrari, a not-very-big car at 8 feet 6 inches of wheelbase, unchromed and unfinned, a model of taste, two big form-fitting leather seats, a little odd space behind, radio, heater, every amenity, a large trunk in the rear and that 180-mph speedometer glowing in a dim blue light. Among all the automobiles available today there is nothing exactly like this, and only once in the sixty years of the automobile has there been: the Bugatti of the 1920s and 1930s, another ivory-and-steel passenger car that could go out and set records.

Enzo Ferrari, who puts his name on these cars, and on the sports and Grand Prix cars that have won so many races in the past dozen years, will be sixty-three soon. He is a tall, spare man. He does not smile frequently. He lives quietly in Modena, ten miles from his factory in Maranello. He is conservative, moderate, unspectacular if one excepts the fact that his concern with his work amounts almost to obsession. He is distant, austere. He is apparently unhappy, like most creative people. He has said, "I feel lost in the cruelty of destiny." The death of his son Alfredo in 1956 profoundly depressed Ferrari. He had intended his son to carry on the work, and when he died in his twenties, of leukemia, Ferrari saw much point and purpose go out of his own life. (The subsequent series of race-cars was called "Dino" after the affectionate diminutive of Alfredo.) Ferrari's temperament is sombre. He has a strong sense of dignity and his own worth, and if his ego is a sturdy, well-nourished plant, it should be: in a very short time as such things go he has cut his name into the record beside Royce, beside Ford and Bentley and Bugatti and Porsche and the rest. Fame has come to some automobiles with time's aid, like ivy growing thicker on a wall, but a child born when Ferrari made his first car isn't out of high school yet.

Ferrari knows automobiles and he knows his business and he knows that it is a rough business. "If a man really calculated the risks he would never drive a racing car," he has said. "Also he would never build one." He was an old-time racing driver and before that he was a mechanic, early in the service of a good house, Alfa-Romeo. He drove first for Alfa-Romeo. Ascari the elder and Campari were on the same team. On June 17, 1923, Ferrari won the Circuit of Savio race at Ravenna, setting a new lap record in the process. The prize that meant most to him that day was nothing the race organizers had to offer; it was a heraldic device, a black horse rampant on a yellow field, given him by the parents of Major Francesco Baracca, the leading Italian pursuit pilot of World War I. Baracca, victor over thirty-six enemy planes, had been shot down on June 18, 1918, so Ferrari had won his first race almost on the fifth anniversary of his death. He was much moved by the gift, part of the Baracca coat-of-arms, and has used it as a personal emblem ever since. The only other award that has meant as much to Ferrari came a few months ago when he was given an honorary degree in engineering by the University of Bologna, one of the oldest universities in the world. A holder of the same degree was Guglielmo Marconi, who invented the radio.

Enzo Ferrari was not a driver of the very first rank, but now and then he was good enough to beat some who were – he beat Tazio Nuvolari on three occasions, and Nuvolari was the greatest of his day and perhaps the greatest of all time. When, in December 1929, the Alfa-Romeo factory withdrew from racing, the team cars and equipment were turned over to Ferrari's management, and for the next few years ran as the Scuderia Ferrari. It was a successful team. Ferrari recruited the best drivers in Europe, and, until the Germans appeared with the monster Mercedes-Benz and Auto-Union cars, Ferrari had notable successes. Nuvolari won the 1930 Mille Miglia driving for the Scuderia, and his legendary victory at the Nürburgring in 1935, when he beat full teams of Mercedes-Benz and Auto-Union cars, was in a Ferrari Alfa-Romeo.

Ferrari put together a car in 1939, the engine built up out of two Fiats, and when the war put a stop to racing he made machine tools. His Maranello factory was hit by eight American bombs in a 1943 daylight raid, and shortly afterward the Germans came along and picked up what equipment was worth taking. Four years passed before Ferrari could get back on his feet and produce the first car wholly of his design and manufacture, a 12-cylinder, 1.5-liter supercharged racing model.

Ferrari is unique in that his passengercar operation is secondary to his racing, and not the other way around. Mercedes-Benz, probably the most successful of all racing organizations, taken by and large over the past half century, bases its racing operation, which is intermittent, on a huge commercial business, and this is the usual rule. Factories producing both racing and passenger cars usually expect to lose money in competition, and to write it off as publicity and advertising and research. Ferrari needs $40,000 or $50,000 a year in prize money to stay in business. He races for keeps.

The intensity with which Ferrari approaches racing has contributed a good deal to the prevailing image of the man. He never sees a race, or almost never. He stays in Modena and waits by the telephone. His tendency to personalize his automobiles and to become emotionally involved with his drivers would create, he feels, an undesirable level of excitement which would communicate itself to the team. He has been severely criticized in recent years because of the deaths of so many ranking drivers at the wheels of Ferrari cars. The toll is in fact impressive, including all the front-rank drivers Italy had – Ascari, Castelotti, Musso – plus the Britons Collins and Wharton and the Spanish Marquis de Portago, to mention only the leading lights. After Portago's Mille Miglia crash, which took fifteen lives, the outcry was particularly vehement. There was nothing wrong with the automobiles. Their list of successes indicated the correctness of their design, and as for material, Ferrari is almost fanatic on the subject of metal fatigue, and maintains the most rigid quality controls. Most of the Ferrari accidents can be traced to human error in one form or another: a missed shift, a tire that should have been changed, a bend entered 3 miles an hour too fast, and so on. If there is an over-all explanation it is that Ferrari cars are very fast, and Ferrari drivers, being picked from among the world's best, are likely to be men who try very hard.

There are those who think they try too hard, and do so because the Commendatore is capable of imposing tremendous competitive pressures on them. Some critics have found this brutal, but to anyone who has ever watched, up close, a college football coach at work, Ferrari's methods do not seem so rough.

They have, in any case, served his purpose. No racing team in history has won so much prize money. The drivers' world championship has been won in his cars, the constructors' world championship, the championship of sports cars and of touring cars, again and again. This year two Americans are driving for him, Phil Hill and Richie Ginther, both Californians, with the ranking German driver, Wolfgang von Trips. Ginther is reserve driver (Ferrari will usually run two cars) and Hill is the No. 1. He is an intense, taut, fluent and intelligent man, a theoretician who possesses a profound understanding of the behavior of race-cars at high speed.

Ferrari is conservative, not quick to undertake major changes. He was not an early convert to disk brakes and fuel injection, for example, and the recent trend to ultra-light rear-engine Grand Prix cars found him lagging. The British dominated 1960 with Cooper and Lotus and BRM rear-engine cars. Ferrari did put out a rear-engine car, but its production was hurried and it was no great threat to the English builders. This year sees a new international formula, specifying 1.5-liter engines to replace the old 2.5s, and a new team of blood-red Ferrari monoposto cars will come out of the shiny-clean shops at Maranello, through the green gate across from the tree-shaded courtyard of the inn, to campaign around the world again. They will certainly be very fast, reflective of Ferrari's intense pride and patriotism. His purpose, he has said, is "to build cars for champions to win championships in." He has won every race of major consequence except one, Indianapolis. Hastily set up Ferrari cars have appeared at Indianapolis, but they have not run successfully. For an Italian team to mount an Indianapolis campaign requires major effort, including absence from perhaps three potentially lucrative European races. Ferrari will eventually make the effort. Someone who knows him well has said, "To Ferrari, a race he hasn't won is a thrown gauntlet."

Meanwhile the lithe and lovely gran turismo machines will come from Maranello in ones and twos and threes, each of them an example of the purest expression man has yet been able to give to the age-old wish to move privately, speedily and elegantly over the face of the earth.