Director Michael Mann's Ferrari, released on Christmas 2023, catches Enzo Ferrari and his namesake firm in a period of challenge. Ten years after founding a car-making operation (mostly to support a racing team) in 1947, Enzo and wife Laura face stiffer competition from Maserati, at a time when both firms plan series production, to make hundreds of cars a year instead of a few dozen, to increase their cash flow. Maserati had previewed the game-changing (for them) 3500GT road car early in 1957, and are a strong favorite to win that year's Formula One championship with their 250F and driver Juan Manuel Fangio. Much to Enzo's annoyance, Maserati had won the '54 World Championship with Fangio in the 250F, beating the Ferrari Squalo (shark) shown below. Mercedes had taken the World Championship in '55, and Ferrari had only managed it in '56 with Fangio driving what was actually a Lancia D50 with Ferrari badges, donated by Gianni Lancia to Ferrari when racing had bankrupted Lancia. In a theme echoed many times on this blog, making racing cars is shown to be a great way to get rid of all your money...
As we are introduced to Enzo (played by Adam Driver) and Laura (Penelope Cruz), we find that this has been the case for them as well. On top of financial worries, they are shadowed by the death in 1956 of their son Dino after a long illness. Besides that '56 GP Championship won with a Lancia, there had been a bit of good news when Eugenio Castellotti had won the rainy, accident-plagued Mille Miglia, a thousand-mile endurance race on public roads, in the Ferrari 290MM below, but in the film we see Castelotti die the next year testing a GP car. And Ferraris were beaten by Jaguars at Le Mans, the most important endurance race, three years in a row, including '57. When Enzo's accountant notes that Mercedes and Jaguar sell thousands of cars a year, using racing only as a form of advertising, he also points out that Ferrari sold only 98 cars in 1956. Ferrari replies that for him, selling cars is only a way of supporting racing. His drivers point out to him that the English have "invented brakes", meaning the disc brakes on all those Jaguars and on the new, mid-engined Coopers, but Enzo waves the reference to Cooper away by saying that the horse must come before the cart. This shows that at heart Ferrari may have been more of a poet than an engineer, because, after all, only front-drive cars put the horse before the cart, and these Fifties Ferraris all have their engines in front, but their driving wheels at the rear...
The film doesn't reveal the ways in which cash flow has gone the wrong way for Ferrari's car business, but the 290MM shown here is a textbook example. It's a 3.5 liter V12, and shares its tubular chassis and 4-speed, rear-mounted transmission with the 3.5 liter, four-cylinder 860 Monza. Wait, you say, Ferrari made 12 and 4-cylinder engines of the same displacement? Yes, they did, and their engineers also created a small number of inline 6-cylinder engines up to 4.4 liters, V12s from 1.5 to 4.9 liters, and more conventional chassis designs with the transmissions right behind the engine in the decade from '47 to '57. Even in Italy, with lower labor costs compared to the US or Germany, tooling costs must've been through the roof. Jaguar used only one engine and 2 chassis designs in this period, and Porsche only 2 different engines and 2 chassis. And that simple Cooper with its relatively cheap, store-bought Climax 4-cylinder engine behind the driver would win the Formula 2 Championship in 1957, the year that Ferrari released a new V6-powered Formula 2 car named for his son Dino. Cooper would win Formula 1 World Championships in '59 and '60, sending a shock wave through the racing world...
The film shows Ferrari showing up before the fateful '57 Mille Miglia, which starts at night, to talk with drivers, though he was known to avoid going to races as he'd seen enough accidents during his own career as a race driver. The night racing scenes are gripping; the production team built 7 replica racers for the scenes involving close racing, including the scene where Stirling Moss slides down a grassy slope after the brake pedal breaks off on his Maserati (this actually happened). Other cars fit the period, though Enzo probably didn't drive the Peugeot shown in an early scene where he leaves the abode of his mistress; Motor Trend indicated in a '57 visit to Modena that he drove a Fiat. That early scene underlines the tension between Laura and Enzo, as he spends more time with his mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley) and their young son Piero, in the wake of Dino's death. This subplot is important to understanding how Laura devoted more time to tracking her investment at the factory itself as Enzo spent more time away or secluded in his office, a phenomenon that led to the famous Great Walkout of October 1961, when 8 engineers left Ferrari in protest of what they viewed as Laura's interference. The Great Walkout followed Ferrari's winning the '61 World Championship with a modern, mid-engined, disc-braked product designed by those engineers, and led to their designs for competing makes like ATS, Bizzarrini, Iso, and most famously, Lamborghini...
There is some foreshadowing as Ferrari tells a driver, "Watch out for children and stray dogs; they're the biggest danger", and you catch a sense of foreboding when we meet a family at dinner just before the cars plunge along a tree-lined country road past their house. An accident that killed Ferrari driver Alfonso de Portago, his co-pilot Edmund Nelson, and 9 others, including 5 children, is depicted with relentless realism (this is not a movie for children). Italian law led to criminal prosecution of Ferrari and tire maker Englebert, and they were only exonerated 4 years later when it was found a glass reflector in the roadway had slashed a tire. Racing on Italian public roads, however, was banned soon after the race, which was won (as if it mattered) by Piero Taruffi*. When an engineer tells him that everyone is aware of the presence of death in racing, Ferrari replies that families and children are not aware of this. After this scene, he walks his son Piero toward the mausoleum where Dino is interred, telling Piero, "You would have loved your brother. He would have taken you everywhere." The film leaves us there, about a year and 5 months before Ferrari finally introduced its first real production car at the Paris Auto Salon, 4 years and 5 months before the Great Walkout, nearly 8 years before an engine deal with Fiat that led to the popular V6 Fiat and Ferrari Dinos, and a dozen years before Fiat's acquisition of a 50% stake in Ferrari. The production cars and the Fiat deals helped Ferrari weather fallout from the Great Walkout, the costly endurance racing battles with Ford that occupied 5 years starting in 1964, and the need to meet the demands of a changing car-buying public. But those are stories for another day…
*Footnote: Piero Taruffi (Patrick Dempsey) makes it clear it no longer matters to him when Ferrari calls to congratulate him. The real Taruffi may have felt this wey, as he wrote an essay for the Saturday Evening Post later in 1957 criticizing the lax safety at motor races, and suggesting improvements. For more on Taruffi and his TARF speed record cars, see "The Etceterini Files Part 31", posted here on June 11, 2024.
Photo Credits:
Top: Neon
2nd & 3rd: the author
4th: Lorenzo Sisti, Washington Post
5th: Eros Hoagland, Washington Post
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