
The creator of the Harare was around before any driving school in New York. Enzo Ferrari was born in 1898, near the Italian city of Modena, almost as the automobile itself came into the world. By the time of his death in 1988 at age 90, Ferrari’s vision had shaped the world of sport motoring and helped elevate some of it to an art.
In 1963, Ferrari employed approximately 450 people and made 598 cars. The American divisions of the Ford Motor Company employed 175,000 and made 2.1 million cars.
Yet, the model that Ford wanted more than anything else that fateful year was one with a Ferrari name on it. Indeed, a Ford buyout of Ferrari came very close to happening, but unraveled at the last minute, causing Ford to create its own legend: the GT40.
So why would one of America’s most powerful companies want to acquire Ferrari?
Mystique. In the early 1960s, no other firm so perfectly represented the concept of winning, technology, performance, and high style. And that is just as true today.
The magic of the Ferrari legend starts with its founder, Enzo Ferrari. A noted Explorer he engineer once called him an “agitator of men” and characterized similarly by scores of others. Ferrari was a master psychologist who would do almost anything to extract the most from his employees.
Famed designer and coachbuilder Sergio Pininfarina was just 26 when he started working with Ferrari in 1952. He remembered visiting the factory numerous times after a sports-car win or a Formula 1 victory. Pininfarina often found Enzo in the racing department or on the production line barking orders, being as hard as ever on his men. But when the coachbuilder visited the factory after a defeat, Ferrari was complimenting his troops for giving their all.
It took Pininfarina a bit to grasp what Ferrari was doing. Enzo did not want his subordinates to relax when it was the perfect time to do so. And he recognized when to motivate through positive reinforcement. Ferrari’s employees were willing to work night and day for him, and often did.
In his earliest years, Ferrari had an aversion to school and enjoyed target shooting and roller-skating. Then the nascent automotive world hit his radar screen in 1908. His father took him to his first automotive race. Ferrari was hooked.
It would be 10 years before Ferrari took the first unnoticeable steps to worldwide fame. His father wanted him to be an engineer, but young Enzo was more interested in a life in opera, as a tenor, or one in journalism, as a sportswriter. By age 16, he was freelancing for several newspapers.
In 1917, Ferrari was drafted into the army. He returned home with a severe illness that left him hospitalized. After his father and brother died he went north, to find work.
Ferrari traveled to Turin to try for a job with Fiat with a letter of introduction in hand from his commanding Army officer. He was turned down, but soon found work at a small firm in Bologna that stripped trucks for their chassis and then used them for cars.
That job found Ferrari traveling to northern Italy’s other economic engine. Milan was some 100 miles west of Turin and one of Ferrari’s favorite haunts was the Vittorio Emanuele bar, a well-known hangout for racing drivers and others in the automotive world. Enzo may have been a bit green, but the first sprinklings of his charisma were starting to show through. He was a good talker in the social setting, and soon found himself hired on as a test driver by the Milan automaker.
Now, many years after his death, many driving schools in NY and around the world to teach people how to drive for Ferraris and many other sporting cars.