FERRARI
Enzo Ferrari was a peculiar man, but a fascinating one at that. Extremely driven and charismatic, there are many stories surrounding his name and his legacy. He always wore sun glasses, only used purple pens, rarely ever gave interviews and never really cared about producing road cars. That’s right, you read that correctly. Enzo only ever started producing road cars because he couldn’t think of any better way to fund his racing team, the only thing he really cared about. In fact, Ferrari as a brand started when Enzo took Alfa Romeo’s racing department into his own hands.
The name “Scuderia Ferrari” literally means “Ferrari Stables”, because Enzo started working on cars as a young boy in his family’s stable and kept using the same location as he got older. Of course, garages didn’t really exist at the time so the stables were the place where most rural families kept their cars, next to the carriages.
His passion brought him to the top of the automotive world fairly quickly and his racing team won some of the most iconic competitions of their time, including the 24h of Le Mans and F1 world titles. He had been a racing driver as a young man, but immediately understood that there were better drivers than him, yet not many could make racing cars better than he could.
The man is a legend and so is his car brand, still to this day. There are plenty of books, movies, documentaries and articles about him so I invite you to look into his story if you haven’t already. I’ll just present you with some of the best machines from his legacy.
F40
Launched to celebrate Ferrari’s 40th anniversary, it left a mark in the automotive world like few other cars will ever manage.
This car would deserve a website to herself, but this is not the place for that. Simply because no combination of words from me could ever do her justice. What I’d like to share with you here is a set of videos that sum up how special she is and how unique she will always be.
The F40 was the last car to be sanctioned by Enzo Ferrari himself and when asked about the controversial looks, he replied “Winning makes cars beautiful”.
One of these videos sadly is in Italian (Eng subs by YouTube) but I just HAD to put it here because it’s an interview to the chief engineer who almost single handedly designed the F40. As he says, all that mattered was performance, down to every bolt. As years go by, cars take more and more people to develop, with marketing getting in the way and budget limits keeping engineers in check. This car is just unrepeatable.