Enzo Ferrari

Enzo Ferrari was a moderately successful racing driver who understood early that he was a better organiser than driver. Scuderia Ferrari, founded in Modena in 1929, ran Alfa Romeos for wealthy amateurs and then became Alfa's works team; when Alfa took the racing in-house in 1939 he left with a settlement and a four-year promise not to put his name on a car. He built two under another badge for the 1940 Mille Miglia, moved his machine-tool works to Maranello in 1943 to escape the bombing, and put the prancing horse on a car for the first time in 1947. He sold road cars, from the beginning and by his own account, for one reason: to pay for the racing.

That priority explains both the company and the man. He almost never left Modena, stopped attending races after 1957, and ran the firm from behind dark glasses through intermediaries and rages. Drivers were tools; when they died — and in the 1950s they died often — he was accused, by the Vatican's newspaper among others, of feeding them to the machine. In 1957 a Ferrari crashed into the crowd at the Mille Miglia, killed nine spectators, and Enzo was charged with manslaughter and acquitted four years later. His wife Laura's interference in the factory provoked the walkout of eight senior managers and engineers in 1961, the so-called palace revolt; he replaced them with a twenty-six-year-old, Mauro Forghieri, and won the sports-car championship anyway. His only legitimate son, Dino, died in 1956. His second son, Piero, born in 1945 to Lina Lardi, was acknowledged only after Laura's death in 1978 and holds a tenth of the company today.

The decision that defined the company came in 1963. Ford negotiated for months to buy Ferrari — the road cars outright, and the racing team with Enzo in charge — for a sum reported at around $18 million. Ferrari read the clause that gave Ford approval over the racing budget, and ended the negotiation. Ford, humiliated, built the GT40 to beat him at Le Mans and did so four years running. Enzo sold half the company to Fiat in 1969 instead, keeping the racing and the veto, and died in 1988 at ninety having overseen the F40. He was, on the plain record, a difficult and sometimes cruel man who built one of the most valuable brands on earth by refusing to sell the only part of it he cared about.