“The upper classes dedicate their leisure time to sports or activities that often involve bizarre risks. (…) The upper classes of the liberal order, among whom there are no bricklayers, love any leisure activity that involves challenging time, one of the capitals they have in abundance. And one of the ways to challenge time is speed. In turn, speed (which has nothing to do with haste) is synonymous with status“.
Raquel Peláez in I want and I can’t: a story of the posh people of Spain.
Enzo Ferrari was born in the 19th century. Yes, in the death throes of the century, but still in the 19th century. It was 1898 and less than a decade remained for the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti collected in The Figaro he Futurist Manifesto.
This most likely explains much of Enzo Ferrari’s life. Il Commendatore He was born in Modena and a year before a handful of artists subscribed to the aforementioned text he was able to see his first car race. It was 1908, I was ten years old. In the next eight years he would lose his brother and his father and would join the ranks of the army in the Great War.
In those days, Enzo Ferrari had already done his first jobs as a mechanic and tried to get his skills taken into account to fix military vehicles although he was unsuccessful in the attempt. Upon his return to a destroyed Italy, he headed to Turin with the dream of joining Fiat, where he was rejected. Despite everything, it didn’t take him long to find a place as a mechanic and with the money he saved he bought an Alfa Romeo and modified it to fulfill one of his dreams: competing.
He was then part of the staff of CMN (Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali) where he was promoted to racing driver, which was a springboard to Alfa Romeo, for whom he competed until the early 1930s. Only the birth of his son Dino removed him from competition and put him in charge of managing the company’s competition department.
Enzo Ferrari in his years as a driver
A running escape
Those years, as we said, coincided with futurism and all kinds of avant-garde movements. The West had entered a wild race that was betting on speed, on the development of faster and more capable machinery. The races multiplied. In 1924 the 24 Hours of Le Mans and in 1927 the Mille Miglia.
Fascist culture carried this search for technical perfection and the cult of movement to its maximum expression, to the point that in Germany the Rekordwoche were born, races on huge highways with closed traffic to show who was faster. In those first Autobhan, Mercedes even proposed reach a top speed of 750 km/h with your Mercedes T-80.
The crazy race for speed attracted, of course, the wealthiest classes. Thorstein Veblen already in his Leisure class theory of 1899 puts on the table that the wealthy need to prove that they have money. That is, it is not enough to have it, you have to show it to the world.
Much of that demonstration was done by showing that one had free time. The worker, he worked. The rich man had free time and enjoyed it. And in those early years of the 20th century it became fashionable to demonstrate it by driving cars at full speed. It is no coincidence that the aforementioned Mille Miglia was an endurance race open to traffic.
That love of speed was doubly attractive because it triggered the risk and the sensation of going beyond the limits that humans had had until then. Man moved faster than ever, speed records on the ground or in flight were constantly being broken.
The Second World War only accelerated everything. The States put all their resources to overcome the rival with more capable vehicles. Without a doubt, without the advances of those days, the technical demonstrations that arrived in the 50s cannot be understood.
In between, The Scuderiathe racing team created by Enzo Ferrari when he took over the competitive side of Alfa Romeo, broke ties with his mother at the beginning of the race. His work was therefore suspended but he recovered it very soon and Already in 1947 it appeared in a minor race as its own team separate from the clover mark. The following year, The Ferrari 166 Inter was launched as the company’s first road car.. It was also the first of the historic 12-cylinder Ferraris.
“I have chosen automobiles as a symbol of extreme freedom for man”Enzo Ferrari would say in some words recorded by Vincenzo Borgomeo in The myth of the Rossa as stated in the Italian encyclopedia Trecanni.
That phrase perfectly sums up what the Ferrari brand became over time. The Maranello company occupied its own space between aristocrats and the nouveau riche who wanted to drive faster than anyone else. Pure muscle that exploded in the 1950s with the development of some of the fastest cars in the world.
Risk, speed and the supposed search for freedom coincide in the death of Alfonso Antonio Vicente Eduardo Ángel Blas Francisco de Borja Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, Spanish pilot better known as Alfonso de Portago and (as you can imagine) Marquis of Portago, who would lose his life on Italian roads aboard a Ferrari that burst a tire while traveling at 250 km/h. His accident was, in fact, the death of the Mille Miglia, which would not be run again in the wild conditions of the time, at full speed dodging cars in open traffic.
The Spanish was the living image of playboy that Enzo Ferrari could have in mind when he sold his cars. He drove for the company in five Formula 1 grands prix and had moved to the endurance team when he took the wheel of the Ferrari 335 Sa beast for the time with V12 engine and the ability to reach 300 km/h top speed. His death, that of the co-pilot and that of 14 spectators, including some children, put an end to the Italian competition.
That death, for which Enzo Ferrari was even accused of reckless homicide, is said to have been one of the episodes that shaped his character and that locked him even more into that figure of an intransigent leader who chose his drivers and who demanded the best from his workers.
The Italian was aware that Ferrari and competition were one but that he needed to sell cars on the street to keep the company in its fleet. The history of Ferrari cannot be understood without its ability to attract the wealthy classes to objects that in the middle of the 20th century were authentic boxes with runaway engines in scary-looking chassis.
The latter, in fact, defined Ferrari for decades. Enzo Ferrari has always shown himself to be a stubborn man in his ideas, which is why he is credited with saying that he sells engines and “gives away the rest of the car” or that “aerodynamics is for those who don’t know how to build engines.”
But he also knew how to exploit all that anxiety of the upper classes that began to settle in his first years of life. We already know, always selling a car less than what the public asked for. Generating a feeling of scarcity and an aura that was sustained by the most advanced cars of the time and a wealthy class that wanted to demonstrate at full speed that they were also seeking freedom.
Photo | Ferrari
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