January was highly productive for Rickenslacker; February much less so. I went back to work, revived the book, and, well, this thing suffered. To fill the space, somewhat shamefully, here’s an essay I published in last week’s The Saturday Paper about the life of Enzo Ferrari. Normal transmission will resume shortly. I promise.
One of the earliest sounds Enzo Ferrari remembered hearing was the forging of metal in his father’s small ironworks beside their home in Modena, Italy. It might also have been the sound of his own will being fashioned – a forbidding force that would later impose itself upon motor-racing for decades.
Ferrari flailed at school, then lost both his father and older brother to influenza in the same year. It was 1916; he was eighteen. Death was a recurring theme in his life, and he would later write, at 65, that “I feel alone after a life crowded by so many events, and almost guilty of having survived.”
He’d dreamed of being a race car driver since he was a boy. At 21, Enzo Ferrari became a test driver for a small car maker. He was soon promoted to racer, and the next year joined Alfa Romeo as one of theirs. He began winning – in 1923, he won his first Grand Prix; the next year he won three.
“One drives at high speeds in order to transcend oneself,” he later wrote, but one could also find oblivion. Fatalities were common, and by 1925 Ferrari had lost two friends. When his first child Alfredo was born, in 1932, Ferrari quit racing and became Alfa Romeo’s racing director. He left just before the war began, starting his own company making parts for other cars, before his factory was commandeered by Mussolini for Italy’s war production.
After the war ended, and Mussolini was left hanging in a public square, Ferrari resumed business – this time designing and manufacturing his own cars. The first car bearing the Ferrari name – and its famous prancing horse badge – rolled off the line in 1947. Four years later, when a Ferrari racing car beat an Alfa Romeo, he would say: “I have killed my mother.”
He became a giant in Italian public life. He was devoted to his small city of Modena, and rarely travelled. He didn’t take holidays. He fixated upon the smallest design details. On paper, he manipulated engines; at the track, the minds of those who drove them. He fostered rivalries amongst his race team, to better impose mental pressure which he thought improved performance.
Enzo Ferrari was also mirthless, autocratic and chronically pessimistic. He was contemptuous of women and often the customers of his own cars. God was a fool’s crutch, he thought, while he preferred “to live in a state of problems and contradictions to believing in religion.”
He became a very wealthy man, but money never seemed to be one of his obsessions. Speed, winning, the perfection of craft – these things obsessed Ferrari, to the point of friendlessness. He could dismiss his own customers as vulgarians, and yet of his own daredevil drivers – the men he depended upon, and who shared his own glorified appetites for risk – he could also be cruelly dismissive.
There’s a scene in Michael Mann’s recent bio-pic when Enzo Ferrari, played by Adam Driver, sits for lunch with his team of drivers after a race. They’ve badly disappointed him. Surveying the table, Ferrari sees talented playboys without the will to win – their brutality has been softened by privilege. Against the Maserati team, his great rival, Ferrari compares them unfavourably: “[They are] hard-nosed pros. Men with a brutal determination to win. With a cruel emptiness in their stomachs. Detachment.”
If you want to drive for me, he’s saying, then you drive without thought for the safety of yourself or others. You drive passionately, gloriously, nervelessly. You steal the opponent’s lines. You don’t hesitate. Because this was, after all, “our deadly passion, our terrible joy.”
My Terrible Joys was the title of Enzo Ferrari’s memoir, published in 1963, and which recorded his ruthlessness with startling honesty: “Once, in my racing days, I was in third position when I suddenly saw a car ablaze on the edge of the track,” he wrote. “I could make out the number: it was the car that had been just in front of me. What thoughts do you think passed through my head at that instant? Well, my first thought was: one less, now I’m second; my second thought was: I wonder if he’s hurt; and my third thought was: it might have been me. These, I conjecture, are probably the typical thoughts and feelings of any driver engaged in a race… I do not believe I am any worse, or any better, than anyone else in this respect.”
Racing came first for Enzo Ferrari; it was elevated above all else – including, many believed, the lives of the men driving his cars. He was a businessman by definition, but not by self-conception. In the year that Mann’s film occurs, 1957, Ferrari was producing only two commercial cars a day – given Enzo’s grand expenditure on racing, at least four times that production was needed to reconcile the books (for contrast, that same year Ford produced 1.65 million cars; Fiat, Italy’s largest manufacturer, about 260,000).
But Enzo was an artisan, as well as a competitive fanatic, and the idea of mass production repulsed him. Not only would it diminish quality, he thought, but also his control over the detail. “Ferrari’s aim is to perfect an ideal, to transform inert raw material into a living machine,” he said in 1966.
But those living machines required living men to test and race them, and the splendour of design was frequently met by the destruction of flesh. In Mann’s film, there is death all the way down – and more ghosts than trophies. It is curious to consider the glamorous Ferrari brand today – purchasable through tote bags and baseball caps, if not their cars – and its detachment from its founder’s grim fatalism.
Ferrari is bookended by Enzo’s daily visit to his son’s crypt, dead the year before at the age of 24 from muscular dystrophy. He visits separately from his wife – their grief and stupefied guilt has fractured their marriage – and he sits and communes through the marble wall. “One must keep working continuously,” he wrote in his memoir, “otherwise one thinks of death.”
But the more he worked, the more death there was. Between 1955 and 1971, eight of Ferrari’s race drivers were killed. This wasn’t unusual – other teams’ drivers were dying in similar numbers – but the work was inseparable from blood. In 1955, at the famous Le Mans race in France, Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes clipped a car at 200 kilometres per hour, became airborne, and exploded upon impact with a barrier. Flaming debris scythed through the crowd; 83 spectators were killed, many decapitated by the demon inertia of the car’s bonnet or crushed by the loosed engine block. It remains motorsport’s worst tragedy, and compelled Switzerland to ban the sport – a prohibition that was lifted only two years ago.
And so, in 1957, Enzo Ferrari is mourning his son while insisting his drivers flirt passionately with death. And so they do: he’s trackside when his driver, Eugenio Castellotti, is killed during a test drive – flung a hundred metres from his car, his skull crushed upon impact. A child’s death might make a man resile from his deathly passions, but not Ferrari. He replaces Castellotti with the dashing Spanish aristocrat, Alfonso de Portago. Onwards, always, to victory.
The film’s climax is that year’s Mille Miglia, a thousand-mile race on open roads between Rome and Brescia, and back again. The annual race was begun in 1927, halted only by the Second World War, and was exemplary of the European embrace of public road racing as the most exciting and demanding form of motorsports. In 1957, Ferrari entered five drivers.
There is a famous photo, known in Italy as “The Kiss of Death”, where de Portago is snapped kissing his secret girlfriend, the actress Linda Christian, during a pitstop in Rome. Moments later, on a straight stretch, his car struck a road stud, burst a tyre, and launched the living machine into a living crowd at high-velocity. Both the driver and navigator died; so too did nine spectators, five of them children.
In Italy, they once said, there was the Pope and there was Enzo Ferrari. After the Mille Miglia tragedy, the Vatican’s newspaper described Ferrari as “an industrialist Saturn devouring his children”. That year’s winner, Ferrari’s Piero Taruffi, was guilt-sick and published an article called: “Stop Us Before We Kill Again.” The race was abolished.
There had been other spectator deaths in previous years, and Enzo Ferrari was later acquitted on charges of manslaughter. But Driver’s portrayal of Ferrari is accurate in one important sense: there’s great mystery about what kind of self-awareness was operating behind the famous sunglasses and forbidding aura.
Was Ferrari eventually and psychotically unconcerned by death? Or did he consider it the tragic cost of his Nietzschean commitment to speed, victory, transcendence? Was life always tasteless to him without the presence of death, or had the passing of his son finally foreclosed all tenderness and prudence?
I return to these lines, committed deep in his memoir: “I feel alone after a life crowded by so many events, and almost guilty of having survived.” Enzo Ferrari would live for another quarter century after those words were published: he died in 1988, aged 90, with many admirers but few friends.
Much of what I’ve written here is not in the film – at least, in any explicit way. But the spirit of it all is. The death and risk and haunted ambition is there, like funky exhaust fumes, and so too the mysteriousness of Ferrari’s stoicism. Mann has made an exceptionally haunting film, and a very adult film, though one, I suspect, that still can’t allow for exactly how monstrously calloused the man became.