History of Ferrari
Ferrari is an Italian company which has produced sports cars since 1947, but traces its roots back to 1929 when Enzo Ferrari formed the Scuderia Ferrari racing team.
In January 2016, Ferrari officially split off from its former parent company Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.
Early history
1929–1937: Scuderia Ferrari
Enzo Ferrari decided to pursue racing in 1908, at the age of ten: to this end, he eventually began a career as a racing driver in 1919. During the 1920s he worked for Alfa Romeo, both as a driver in various local races and as an employee in its Milan sales depot. In 1929, though, he broke from this line of work to found and manage his own racing team, which he named Scuderia Ferrari. Conceived as an outfit for gentleman drivers and other amateurs, the team was founded through a million-lira loan from a local bank, with additional backing from the wealthy amateur racer Mario Tadini, Augusto and Alfredo Caniato — two brothers in the textile industry — and the tyre company Pirelli. It would be based out of Modena, Enzo's hometown.Enzo quickly set about negotiating with Giorgio Rimini, Alfa Romeo's commercial director, and managed to secure a partnership between their respective companies. The intended arrangement was simple: Alfa Romeo would outfit their factory team, Alfa Corse, with its latest, most sophisticated cars, while Ferrari's scuderia of amateurs would use lower-end cars and hand-me-downs from past seasons. Additionally, Ferrari would operate independently from Alfa Romeo, such that the automaker would be insulated from negative press whenever the team placed poorly. Enzo presented this as beneficial to everyone involved, as it allowed Alfa Romeo to stay active in racing with minimal effects on their other ventures. The team's first race was the 1930 Mille Miglia, using cars supplied by Alfa Romeo, and the first use of the Prancing Horse logo was at the 1932 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps.
File:1935-06-15 Altapascio Alfa Bimotore Nuvolari Bazzi.jpg|thumb|right|The Alfa Romeo Bimotore photographed during a land speed record attempt, alongside its engineer and driver Tazio Nuvolari.
This initial arrangement did not last. After Alfa Romeo came under the control of the Italian state in 1933, their racing division was downsized, and Scuderia Ferrari functioned as the unofficial company team throughout the mid-1930s. Leading up to the 1934 Grand Prix season, Ferrari began conducting their own research and development while Alfa Romeo continued to supply racing cars, a situation that led to vehicles being engineered within Ferrari themselves. These include a streamlined variant of the Type B optimised for AVUS, and the Alfa Romeo 8C#16C Bimotore, also based on the Type B, which was driven by two engines at once: one in front of the driver and another behind, each driving the rear wheels through a special split differential. These "first Ferraris" tended to be ad hoc and relatively primitive, as Alfa Romeo was facing rough financial outcomes with negligible support from the Italian government. During its heyday, the Scuderia Ferrari of the 1930s employed several notable figures including Vittorio Jano, who served as the team's chief designer, and drivers such as Antonio Ascari, Giuseppe Campari, and Tazio Nuvolari.
Motorcycle racing
From 1932 to 1935 Scuderia Ferrari also operated a motorcycle racing division, which was conceived as a way to scout and train future Grand Prix drivers. Instead of Italian motorcycles, the team used British ones manufactured by Norton and Rudge. Though Ferrari was successful on two wheels, winning three national titles and 44 overall victories, it was eventually pushed out of the discipline both by the obsolescence of pushrod motorcycle engines and broader economic troubles stemming from the Great Depression.1938–1945: Auto Avio Costruzioni
In their early years, Scuderia Ferrari enjoyed considerable independence from Alfa Romeo, owing both to their loose partnership and the physical distance between Modena and Alfa Romeo's facilities in Milan. In 1937, though, Alfa Romeo began to reconsider this inefficient state of affairs, and at the end of the year they purchased 80% of Scuderia Ferrari's shares, absorbing it into the company. Enzo remained the team's manager until a restructuring in 1939, in which he was laid off. After this, he used his capital — sourced from his savings, a hefty settlement, and the sale of his team two years prior — to start his own automotive company, Auto Avio Costruzioni. Ferrari's new company, the direct predecessor of the contemporary Ferrari S.p.A., could not be branded by his surname for another four years due to a noncompete agreement he had reached with Alfa Romeo.The company produced only a single car: the Auto Avio Costruzioni 815, both examples of which failed to complete their inaugural race. Racing opportunities dried up after Italy entered World War II in 1940, and the company was mobilised for wartime production in 1941; it was not down on its luck, though, as it received lucrative contracts to manufacture military hardware. The most valuable of these contracts was for grinding machines under licence from the German company Jung, used to manufacture precision components, particularly ball bearings. Enzo Ferrari had a strained relationship with the Germans, who asserted he was never granted permission to manufacture Jung's machines, and an ambivalent one with the Italian resistance movement, which distrusted him due to his ties with the National Fascist Party. Enzo appeased the resistance through various means, such as by safeguarding money belonging to the Italian Communist Party, and through a friend's payment of a 500,000-lira ransom targeted at him.
The war had other effects on the company as well: in order to avoid the Allied bombing campaigns occurring throughout Italy at the time, Ferrari moved his factory from Modena to Maranello in 1943. Though the new plant was still bombed twice, once in November 1944 and again in February of 1945, Ferrari remains in Maranello to this day. The company primarily made grinding machines only after moving to Maranello, while in Modena they mostly focused on producing aircraft engines. Though he could not build any cars, Enzo continued to conceptualise new racing car designs throughout the war.
In 1945, Auto Avio Costruzioni was renamed Auto Costruzioni Ferrari. The change in name reflected Enzo's desire to fully break out into the automotive industry: "I had had ambitious plans for launching out into the manufacture of high-quality cars," he once said. "I remembered that I had joined Alfa Romeo when they were endeavouring to produce one car a day, and I too had hopes of achieving this same target."
1946–1959: The beginning
In all, World War II was good for Ferrari, as the associated military contracts allowed the company to raise significant capital for postwar automotive production. It would continue to produce grinding machines, its most lucrative wartime contract, into the late 1940s in order to finance its racing operations.Gioacchino Colombo, an engineer on hiatus from Alfa Romeo, was tasked with designing a new Ferrari engine from the ground up. Enzo specified that it would follow a V12 configuration: this was both because the design could be applied to both sports cars and Grand Prix racing with minimal modification, and because he was personally impressed by the V12 designs previously produced by Auto Union, Delage, Packard, and Alfa Romeo. He was also simply passionate about V12 engines: he recalled thinking about the layout as early as 1925, and he considered their sound to be "the Italian interpretation of refined engineering." Enzo's co-workers and rivals considered his fixation on V12s to be irrational, and he was ridiculed for his choice. The resulting engine, commonly called the Colombo engine after its designer, was highly versatile: it would be used in various Ferrari models until 1988, by that point having tripled its displacement and nearly quadrupled its power output.
Enzo also met with Luigi Chinetti that year, who convinced him of the potential value of selling his cars in the United States. Chinetti, who had been selling European racing cars since the 1920s, believed that the United States' dynamic economy could sustain Ferrari's racing aspirations far better than war-torn Europe. Enzo concurred, and on 24 December 1946 he made Chinetti his official North American importer. Ferrari vehicles were shipped to the United States, which was to become one of the automaker's primary markets, as early as 1949.
125 S: the first Ferrari
The first Ferrari sports car, as well as the first car to use Colombo's new engine, was the 1947 125 S. Purpose-built for sports car racing, it achieved the company's first victory at the 1947 Grand Prix of Rome, where it was driven by Franco Cortese. Of the ten races the car entered, it won six, placed second in one, and retired from three. Cortese remarked that compared to his competition, the 125 S "was a more modern machine, indeed exceptional for those days." Ferrari itself tends to cast the 125 S's production as the starting point of its history, marking 1947 as its founding date during its anniversary celebrations.The 125 S was developed alongside the 125 F1, first raced for the 1948 Grand Prix season. The open-wheel racer's engine was identical to the 125 S's except that, in keeping with regulations, it was fitted with a single-stage supercharger. It was first raced at the 1948 Italian Grand Prix, where its encouraging performance convinced Enzo to continue the company's costly Grand Prix racing programme.
Subsequent Ferrari models
Soon after debuting the 125 S, Ferrari produced many other sports cars in a variety of body styles. Until the late 1960s all of the company's road car models shared a characteristic layout, a front-engine design driven by a V12 engine. Enzo had a strong personal preference for this layout, arguing in later years that the size and weight of a typical Ferrari V12 made it difficult to place anywhere else in the car.In the earliest years of Ferrari's production, the difference between its racing and road models was very small; one author claims that it is so scant as to be "strictly a matter of interpretation," and that even the more well-appointed cars were impractical to drive on the road. The 166 Inter, the company's first grand tourer, was a step away from the earlier, dual-purpose sports cars exemplified by the 159 S and 166 S. It was followed by the 195 Inter and 212 Inter, the engine inside growing progressively larger. The Inter cars collected a not insignificant track record through both factory-backed and privateer entries.
The 166 MM was the 166 Inter's racing-oriented sibling. Though it was made in other styles, the car is perhaps most recognizable in its barchetta configuration, bodied by Carrozzeria Touring. The 166 MM barchetta was a capable racing machine — in 1949 it won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Targa Florio, and Spa 24 Hours — and the car's racing cachet helped build Ferrari's reputation very early in its history. The nickname barchetta, meaning calls attention to the chassis's superleggera strengthening ribs, which grant the car a boat-like shape; the name was first used at the 1948 Turin Auto Show, likely applied by a journalist. In 2005,
Motor Trend Classic placed the 166 MM barchetta sixth in their list of the ten "greatest Ferraris of all time."
The America series of grand touring cars began production in 1950, starting with the 340 America racing model. Enzo intended for the new car to compete against racers with high-displacement American engines: to this end, it was fitted with a 4.1-litre iteration of the company's new Lampredi engine, originally designed for Formula One. A road variant, the 342 America, was produced just one year later; the new car, intended for elite customers with negligible interest in racing, featured new bodywork and a detuned engine. Subsequent Americas followed in the 342's lead as luxurious grand tourers. The America series used the Lampredi engine until 1959, which in the process grew to a displacement of 5 litres.
By 1953, Enzo, having grown tired of small-scale sales, hoped to expand and standardise the production of his road cars. The fruition of this wish was the highly prolific 250 series. The 250s, named after their 3-litre Colombo engine, were introduced in the midst of the company's transition from hand-built to series-produced vehicles: though the idea of a mass-produced Ferrari could be traced back to the 1953 250 Europa, the 250 GT Coupé became the first series-produced Ferrari in 1958, following an expansion of Pinin Farina's production facilities. The 250 series was sold in an expansive array of body styles, including the US-oriented California Spyder, a tighter-handling short wheelbase version, and convertible iterations of the coupé body style. Racing-oriented 250s were extensively used throughout the 1950s and 1960s, many of them special variants of road cars, and several examples, such as the 250 Testa Rossa and 250 Tour de France, are known for their success on the track.