Lunch with Mussolini

Enzo Ferrari in his first race, the 1919 Parma to Poggio di Berceto hill climb.

It​ was hot on the tarmac at Vallelunga, in the low thirties centigrade, though not as hot as it had been 24 hours earlier – when the mercury had been pushing forty – and the high humidity of the previous few days had dissipated too. A nice day for a drive, even if sweat was pooling in my disposable latex gloves as I waited in the pits for my turn in the Ferrari F430. We weren’t there for our comfort, we’d been told during the welcome briefing in one of the pit garages earlier. I’d come for a two-lap ‘driving experience’ at the Autodromo di Vallelunga, just east of Lake Bracciano, for many years the site of the Formula Two Rome Grand Prix. Football players didn’t get to complain about sweating in the heat, and neither did Ferrari race mechanics, and so neither did we.

There were nine Ferraris on the track, along with two Lamborghinis, a Porsche, an Aston Martin, a Maserati, a McLaren, an Alfa Romeo, a pair of Audis and a Nissan (if you think that sounds like the odd one out, think again: the Nissan GT-R has a top speed of nearly 200 mph and can go from 0 to 60 in 2.7 seconds). The F430 (top speed 197 mph, and 0 to 60 in a sluggish 3.9 seconds) was the cheapest Ferrari available: half the price of the SF90 Spider, which can go over 220 mph and does 0 to 60 in 2.3 seconds. Those differences make a difference if you know what you’re doing but, as I’d been told in no uncertain terms at the ‘technical briefing’, even if you think you’re a good driver, even if you passed your test thirty years ago and have more than a million kilometres of road under your tyres, that doesn’t mean you’ll be good at driving a supercar. You could almost hear a hundred middle-aged men (and two women) thinking: ‘I bet I will be, though.’

Racing drivers make the worst road drivers, we were told. Charles Leclerc doesn’t know how to park. (There are entire social media threads devoted to pictures of the Formula One driver parking badly: just search Reddit for ‘Charles Leclerc v. parking his car’.) Someone asked about Ayrton Senna. The man addressing us paused, shook his head: ‘When I remember the first of May 1994 …’ Senna was a special case but the point remained that driving on the public road doesn’t prepare you for trying to handle one of these machines. I’m fairly certain I didn’t miss out on much by picking the F430 instead of a more expensive model. There’s an old Top Gear episode from 2010 in which Jeremy Clarkson claims that the F458 makes the F430 obsolete, but there’s an even older episode (from 2005) in which he says the F430 is pretty much perfect. In any case, he’s driven a lot more Ferraris than I have.

Before getting in our cars we had a ride round the circuit in a minibus to familiarise us with the track. The driver flatteringly talked us through how to take each of the corners to optimise the racing line: move to the right here; to the left there; those cones on either side of the track show you when to hit the brakes as you come into each bend. There were a lot of skid marks going off into the gravel. The minibus driver was no slouch and, sitting in the front, I had to hang onto the door handle on the right-hand bends to avoid getting too intimate with the man sitting between me and the driver. He was from Greece. It was his second time driving a supercar: he’d already done it in Belgium, in a Porsche 991 GT3 RS. He’d chosen the Porsche again today. He liked the Porsche.

Equipped with my latex gloves, disposable balaclava, white helmet and sunglasses, I followed my roadside assistant to the F430. He leaned in and shunted the driver’s seat all the way back. (‘Aren’t you a bit tall for a sports car?’ someone had said to me before I went, but I thought I’d be all right: Clarkson fits comfortably in a Ferrari, and he’s an inch taller than me. Enzo Ferrari himself was well over six foot.) I ducked down and settled in. The instructor in the passenger seat, also wearing a helmet, shook my hand and introduced himself as Paolo.

He talked me through the controls: keep your left foot well away from the pedals, as there’s no clutch. Good. Hands on the wheel not at ten and two, as I’d been taught by my driving instructor, Jackie, in Basingstoke thirty years ago, but at nine and three. Could I turn it 180° in both directions, crossing my arms (as Jackie had taught me never to do)? Good. OK: foot on the brake, squeeze the right-hand gear paddle to put it in gear. Right to change up, left to change down? I asked. It’s in automatic, Paolo said: I’d have more fun that way, able to concentrate on the pedals and the steering. How many laps was I doing? Two? Maybe I could try it in manual for the second lap (a suggestion almost immediately forgotten, as he no doubt knew, from long experience, it would be). Touch the accelerator and ease out. Paolo reached over to place a reassuring hand on the steering wheel. As we arrived at the end of the pit lane, ready to join the main track, like a plane taking off from a runway, I looked in the mirror. Paolo told me to keep my eyes on the road. He’d check the mirrors. And we were off.

At first I tried to drive smoothly, which was clearly a mistake. Most of Paolo’s instructions were brake harder, accelerate more, don’t grip the wheel so tight. Brake. Brake again. Over to the right. Turn. Accelerate. More. More. I gradually – or quickly; my sense of time had completely gone – came to trust him. Full throttle till you reach the cones before each corner; then stamp hard on the brakes. I was better at it on the second lap.

Get closer to him but don’t overtake, Paolo said of the orange and black McLaren 720S Coupé up ahead. I put my foot down. The McLaren signalled that it was pulling in, and I whizzed past, feeling quite pleased with myself, even though we’d been told during the technical briefing, with much emphasis, that this wasn’t a race. We’d also been told that no one would be judging us, though when I floored the accelerator to cross the starting grid at the end of my first lap, roaring past the pits and the straggle of spectators, I wasn’t doing it solely for my own benefit, or at least was conscious of being watched. But that awareness slipped away as I reached whatever top speed it was that I reached: eyes fixed on the road ahead for the duration of my double circuit, I barely glanced at the speedometer, though the one time I remember doing so, coming out of the sixth corner, the needle was climbing rapidly past 160 kph (100 mph), and it didn’t feel all that fast. When I was going really fast, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the road to check my speed. I didn’t even think about it. Though I’m not sure I ever quite reached ‘the point, at 7000 rpm’, which according to Carroll Shelby, or Matt Damon playing Shelby in the movie Ford v. Ferrari, is ‘where everything fades’.

It didn’t feel much like driving – the technical briefing had been right about that – and not only because I mostly drive a one-litre Skoda Octavia Estate. Sitting in the Ferrari with my hands gripping the wheel (‘not so tight’), foot hovering near the accelerator, waiting to pull away, felt more like holding a chainsaw: the sense of wielding immense mechanical power that I wasn’t trained or qualified to wield; the alarming capacity to inflict damage, to cause harm through incompetence. But once I was out of the pit lane, a safe distance from the pedestrians, accelerating along the straights, braking hard before the corners, careening round them, accelerating hard out of them, the g-forces conjured a long distant memory of bungee-jumping. Bungee-jumping with a chainsaw, then? But that would be a grotesque spectacle. And a Ferrari is not only fast and deadly but beautiful, too, like a hand-forged katana, though it cuts through the air not with a swish and a whisper but with a resounding, thunderous purr.

Enzo Ferrari​ was a driver before he was a car maker, and a racing fan before he was a driver. Born in Modena in 1898, he was ten years old when he saw Felice Nazzaro win the Florio Cup, completing ten laps of the 52.8 km dirt-road circuit around Bologna in under four and a half hours. Ferrari was far from the only Italian to be bewitched by the promise of speed in the autumn of 1908. Around the time that Enzo was watching Nazzaro and Vincenzo Lancia roar past in their Promethean machines, Marinetti wrote the Manifesto of Futurism: ‘We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed … A race-automobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.’ One of Giacomo Balla’s Futurist paintings of 1913 now hangs in Tate Modern: Velocità astratta – l’auto è passata (‘Abstract speed – the car has passed’) shows a spray of pink-tinged dust on an empty white road, green hills, blue skies, gestures of atmospheric disturbances.

In his biography of Ferrari, published in Italy in 2022 and which he has now translated into English, Luca Dal Monte writes that ‘from his father young Enzo learned the importance … of “diligently keeping a record of everything that went on”,’ and Dal Monte too has taken the lesson to heart, sparing no details. Enzo’s father, Alfredo Ferrari, ran a metalworking business. He died of pneumonia in January 1916. Later that year, Enzo’s older brother also died of pneumonia, while serving as an ambulance driver on the Alpine front. Enzo meanwhile had a job in Modena, training metalworkers for an ammunition factory, but was drafted into the army as part of the mass mobilisation after Italy’s calamitous defeat at Caporetto in November 1917. Before long he too fell ill with pneumonia. Transferred to a hospital in Bologna, he was kept awake at night by the hammering of the coffin makers next door.

He recovered, and after the war went to Turin to try to get a job at Fiat, but they turned him down. In the spring of 1919 he moved to Milan to work for Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali and in October took part in Italy’s first postwar motor race, the Parma to Poggio di Berceto hill climb. The following month he competed in the Targa Florio in Sicily. A spectator was killed when he ‘inadvertently crossed the finish line’, as Dal Monte puts it, ‘just as [the winning car] was speeding by’. Ferrari later wrote in his autobiography that this was the first time he became aware of the presence of death on the racetrack. It wouldn’t be the last.

In 1920 he was hired as a driver by Alfa Romeo, joining Antonio Ascari and Giuseppe Campari there. When he came second in the Targa Florio, frustrated not to have won, he wept ‘like a child’ and vowed never to race again. It was an empty promise, or threat, that he would make and break repeatedly over the course of his long life. He left his job at CMN and opened his own coachbuilding business in Modena. To finance the enterprise he sold much of what remained of the family property – against the better judgment of his mother, Adalgisa. She wasn’t too pleased the following year, either, when Enzo’s Torinese girlfriend, Laura Garello, moved into his apartment in Modena. He went bust in 1922 and Adalgisa sold off her furniture to help pay her son’s debts. When Enzo and Laura married in Turin in April 1923, Adalgisa refused to go to the wedding. She was proved right about that, too: the marriage, emotionally and physically distant, was not a happy one.

Driving wasn’t Ferrari’s only job for Alfa Romeo, and it wasn’t what he was best at: soon after he married, he was sent on clandestine missions to Turin to poach Fiat’s top engineers. His skills as a recruiter – knowing whom to ask, and how – would serve him well throughout his career. He also ran an Alfa Romeo dealership in Modena. Racing drivers de facto made great salesmen, and that was very much the way the company saw things: the purpose of racing, for Alfa Romeo’s executives, was to help them sell cars. Ferrari, on the contrary, would always insist that selling cars was ancillary to motor racing. (‘I sell sports cars as a way to allow my workers to support themselves, and to find the means necessary to construct race cars,’ he told the Gazzetta dello Sport in 1951.) But he recognised early that there were other ways to indulge his passion besides driving race cars himself.

In October 1925, within weeks of winning the Italian Grand Prix at Monza and with it the 1925 World Championship, Alfa Romeo decided that running their own racing team wasn’t worth the candle. Two of the drivers who started their own teams in the following years were Tazio Nuvolari and Emilio Materassi. Ascari wasn’t among them, because he’d died from his injuries following a crash in the French Grand Prix in July 1925, a month after winning in Belgium. Materassi died at the Italian Grand Prix in 1928, in the second most deadly accident in the history of motor racing. As he was trying to overtake Giulio Foresti’s Bugatti at over 200 kph, he swerved, lost control of his Talbot 700, flew over a safety ditch and ploughed into a grandstand, killing 23 people and injuring dozens more. The rest of the Scuderia Materassi withdrew from the race but the other teams’ drivers carried on. The Italian Grand Prix was cancelled for the next two years.

Nuvolari’s scuderia (it means ‘stable’; the analogy with horse-racing also persists in English motor racing terms such as ‘paddock’, which Italian has adopted as a loanword), did well early in the 1928 season, winning three races in March and April, but struggled as the year wore on, given the difficulties of managing a racing team without the support of a manufacturer, and with only Nuvolari’s own winnings to finance the operation. Ferrari was careful not to make the same mistakes when he established his own scuderia in November 1929. He secured the backing of a few investors, Campari’s services as a driver, and a million lire bank loan from the Banca di San Geminiano (their trust in him paid off: he banked with them for the rest of his life). He bought five Alfa Romeos and before 1930 was over had hired Nuvolari as a driver too.

The prancing horse logo first appeared on Scuderia Ferrari’s cars (manufactured by Alfa Romeo) in 1932. During the First World War, Italy’s leading fighter pilot, Francesco Baracca, had painted the cavallino rampante on his biplane. He was shot down and killed in June 1918. Baracca’s parents met Ferrari after he won a race in 1923 and told him he should use their son’s symbol on his cars to bring him luck. Nine years later he took them up on the offer. It was also in 1932 that Ferrari stopped driving race cars himself, for good: in part because running his businesses was already a full-time job; in part because he knew he would never be one of the greats; and in part because Laura had had a baby, and he didn’t want to run the considerable risk of leaving Alfredo (Dino) fatherless by dying in a crash.

All of this​ was taking place under Fascism. Mussolini was appointed prime minister by the king of Italy on 30 October 1922. Ferrari, busy at the Alfa Romeo headquarters in Milan, wasn’t paying attention. Italy’s last multi-party elections before 1946 (though they were hardly free or fair) were held on 6 April 1924. A week later Nuvolari won the opening race of the Grand Prix season at Tigullio. The socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a Fascist death squad on 10 June 1924, nine days after Ferrari won the Circuito del Polesine in an Alfa Romeo RL SS. Antonio Gramsci was arrested on 9 November 1926. ‘Enzo Ferrari spent 1926 in Modena,’ Dal Monte writes. ‘He was seen at football matches, cycling events and, in the winter months, even at ski events on the slopes of the Apennines.’ What else was he supposed to do?

By his own account Ferrari met Mussolini once, on 9 April 1924. He was asked to lead the motorcade escorting the prime minister from Modena to Sassuolo for lunch. Ferrari drove so fast that Mussolini couldn’t keep up and nearly skidded off the road. They didn’t eat at the same table. On the way back Ferrari drove more carefully, as requested. Here, as elsewhere, Dal Monte’s only source is Ferrari’s autobiography, and he repeats the story uncritically. Whether or not it’s true in every respect, it seems to convey an honest reckoning of Ferrari’s accommodations with the regime: he was far from a full-throated supporter, and colluded only as far as was necessary to pursue his interests. He joined the party in 1934, but only because it was impossible otherwise to get a passport to go to the Monaco Grand Prix.

Still, some of the compromises are harder to stomach than others, especially the ones that don’t seem to have felt like compromises at the time. In Libya in the early 1930s, Italian forces displaced, imprisoned and killed tens of thousands of people in a brutal campaign of repression. They used mustard gas and starvation as well as more conventional weapons to quell the local population. The Tripoli Grand Prix was paused for 1931 and 1932, at the height of the violence, but was then won twice in succession by Achille Varzi, driving a Bugatti in 1933 and in 1934 an Alfa Romeo for Scuderia Ferrari. (The 1935 race was won by Rudolf Caracciola, driving a Nazi-boosted Mercedes-Benz, and Varzi won again in 1936, having left Ferrari for another German team, Auto Union.) It is – or should be – hard to see these triumphs as anything but victory laps around a hecatomb by a Fascist occupying power. But not if you keep your eyes trained on the racetrack. ‘The nightmare was materialising,’ Dal Monte writes of early 1936. But he isn’t thinking of the conquest of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War or the remilitarisation of the Rhineland. The ‘nightmare’ was that diplomatic relations between France and Italy had reached such a low that Ferrari’s team couldn’t compete in the Pau Grand Prix.

In 1937 the scuderia was dissolved and absorbed into Alfa Romeo, which had been entirely controlled by the corporatist state since 1933, and Ferrari was appointed head of the new Alfa Corse racing team on a three-year contract. It was terminated early, however, on 6 September 1939. ‘The current international situation,’ Alfa Romeo’s managing director wrote to Ferrari with studied understatement, five days after Germany invaded Poland, ‘has determined the cessation of the racing activity that you headed as our consultant.’ Ferrari went home to Modena and set up a new company, Auto Avio Costruzioni, to manufacture cars and aeroplane parts. He bought two chassis from Fiat, designed and built the 1.5-litre, eight-cylinder engines at his workshop in Modena and commissioned the coachwork – about which ‘he had well-defined ideas’ – from Carrozzeria Touring in Milan. His deal with Alfa Romeo meant he couldn’t use his name for the car (strictly, he shouldn’t have built it at all), so he called it simply the 815, after the size of the engine.

The ‘international situation’ meant a much reduced racing season in 1940 – no Grands Prix on mainland Europe – though as Italy hadn’t yet entered the war the Targa Florio took place in Palermo on 23 May (while Allied troops in Belgium were being pushed back towards Dunkirk). Ferrari’s 815s didn’t compete. A month earlier, though, on 28 April, they’d taken part in the Mille Miglia. The ‘thousand mile’ endurance race usually ran from Brescia to Rome and back again, though in 1940 it didn’t leave Lombardy, going nine times round a Brescia-Cremona-Mantua triangle. Scuderia Ferrari had dominated the race for most of the 1930s, but in 1940 BMW took four of the top six places.

After Italy joined the war in June 1940, Ferrari turned to manufacturing aircraft engines and machine tools – which were tagged with the prancing horse and the words ‘Scuderia Ferrari’ (during another crisis eighty years later, Ferrari temporarily shifted to producing ventilators for Covid patients). In September 1943 he moved his factory out of Modena – and, he hoped, away from Allied bombers – to Maranello, twenty kilometres to the south. Within days, the government in Rome – Mussolini had been ousted in July – signed an armistice with the Allies, and the Nazis invaded northern Italy. Ferrari’s factory was occupied and his grinding machines shipped off to Germany, though the trains were intercepted and unloaded by partisans on their journey north. Ferrari, ever the pragmatist, turned a blind eye when the partisans among his workforce used his warehouses at night to repair their weapons and craft sabotage devices. He also gave sanctuary to an injured partisan fighter and (separately) a Jewish family. During the reprisals after Liberation he may have come close to being killed for collaborating with the Nazis, but he seems to have done enough to avoid both sides’ blacklists.

Ferrari’s second son, Piero, was born in May 1945. The mother wasn’t Laura but Lina Lardi degli Adelardi, who worked as his secretary and with whom he had been in a semi-clandestine relationship since 1929. With the war over, Ferrari wasted no time getting his car business up and running again. In August 1945 he hired the engine designer Gioacchino Colombo, who had built the engine of the Alfa Romeo 158 before the war, and less than eighteen months later, in March 1947, he drove the first car that carried his name, the Ferrari 125 (each of its twelve cylinders had a displacement of 125cc), out of the gates of the Maranello factory, three kilometres along the road and back again. Its first race was at Piacenza on 11 May, with Franco Cortese at the wheel. He had to withdraw because of a technical failure but two weeks later in Rome he won, beating Guido Barbieri’s Maserati by more than twenty seconds.

Yet as the races and the victories piled up, so did the bodies. At the Circuito di Modena on 28 September, Cortese pulled out of the pits into the path of Giovanni Bracco’s Delage. Bracco swerved to avoid him, lost control and ploughed into the crowd, killing five spectators, including a nine-year-old boy, and injuring seventeen. The race was stopped. The police interviewed both drivers but decided no one was to blame. Forty thousand people went to the joint funeral at Modena cathedral. Two weeks later, Raymond Sommer won the Turin Grand Prix in a Ferrari 159. He was killed when his car (a Cooper, not a Ferrari) overturned during the Haute-Garonne Grand Prix in September 1950. Antonio Ascari’s son, Alberto, was killed test-driving a Ferrari at Monza in May 1955, four days after he’d survived skidding into the harbour during the Monaco Grand Prix.

The worst motorsport disaster ever occurred at Le Mans on 11 June 1955, three hours into the 24-hour endurance race, when Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes rear-ended Lance Macklin’s Austin-Healey – which had veered into Levegh’s path to avoid Mike Hawthorn’s Jaguar, braking for a pit stop – and flew off into the crowd. At least eighty people were killed. The race was not stopped. An official inquiry found no one responsible but criticised the track design.

No Ferraris were involved in the catastrophe at Le Mans. Two years later, however, during the 1957 Mille Miglia, on 12 May, at Guidizzolo, only fifty kilometres from the finish in Brescia, Alfonso de Portago’s Ferrari 335 S had a blow-out in a front tyre. He lost control and ploughed into the crowd, killing nine spectators, including five children, and injuring seventeen. De Portago and his navigator, Edmund Nelson, were both killed. Ferrari was investigated for murder, and not cleared until 1961, when it was determined that the puncture was an accident caused by a cat’s eye. (The disaster is at the centre of Michael Mann’s 2023 movie, Ferrari, starring Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz.) The Mille Miglia was cancelled indefinitely.

After the death of Luigi Musso in the French Grand Prix in July 1958, the Catholic Church intervened to point the finger at Enzo Ferrari. An article in the Vatican newspaper, the Osservatore Romano, described him as an ‘industrial Saturn … devouring his sons’. The following month, Peter Collins died in a crash at the German Grand Prix. A race steward heard him say ‘like Musso’ before he lost consciousness. In October, Father Leonardo Azzollini wrote an article in the Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica calling for motor racing to be banned. In December, Ferrari held a press conference at which he blamed race organisers for the safety failures that led to the deaths of his (and other) drivers and spectators. A few days later he met Azzollini at the archbishop’s palace in Modena. They talked for five hours, at the end of which the priest was persuaded of the car maker’s opinion, and in March 1959 he wrote another piece for Civiltà Cattolica serenely arguing the opposite of the case he’d made five months earlier.

The force of character, strength of conviction and rhetorical dexterity that enabled Ferrari to outmanoeuvre a Jesuit priest were key to his success. The skills that made him a household name (‘the most famous Italian in the world’, Dal Monte says) lay in man management and public relations as much as – if not more than – engineering or driving, though his monomania, ambition and aesthetic judgment certainly helped too. He had a gift for hiring the right people and inspiring (or coercing) them to do their best work, whether as engineers, coachbuilders or drivers, though he had a gift for falling out with them, too: Colombo was back at Alfa Romeo by 1950.

Ferrari had realised he needed to exert more direct control over the bodywork of his vehicles after he saw what Giannino Marzotto, one of the heirs to the Marzotto textile empire who’d won the 1950 Mille Miglia, did with the two Ferrari 212 chassis he bought in 1951. Instead of going to one of Ferrari’s recommended coachbuilders, as other, more biddable private clients did, Marzotto commissioned bodywork of his own design, nicknaming the cars the ‘Egg’ and the ‘Little Spider’. When Ferrari saw them, he erupted with rage: ‘It’s as if you’d raped my daughter in front of my eyes!’ (he had no daughter). Soon after, he came to an arrangement with the Turin coachbuilder Battista ‘Pinin’ Farina, though they had to meet on neutral turf, at a restaurant halfway between Turin and Modena, because neither would stoop to visiting the other’s headquarters. Farina’s firm designed the bodywork of almost every roadgoing Ferrari until 2012 (including the F430 I drove at Vallelunga).

Farina was already at the top of his field when he started working with Ferrari. Other collaborators were appointed with little or no experience. In 1960 Bologna University gave Ferrari an honorary degree in mechanical engineering. He had to read an essay at the ceremony, and to help him write it he asked his barber’s daughter’s boyfriend, Franco Gozzi, a law graduate kicking his heels while he waited for a job at the Banca di San Geminiano. Gozzi never went to work for the bank, but spent most of the next thirty years as Ferrari’s press officer and one of his closest confidants. The first edition of Ferrari’s wonderfully readable autobiography, Le mie gioie terribili (‘My Terrible Joys’), was written in 1962 with Gian Paolo Ormezzano, a young journalist who’d interviewed him for Tuttosport two years earlier, though Gozzi read the manuscript over carefully. Luca di Montezemolo was 26 when Ferrari made him manager of the Scuderia in 1974: they won the Constructors’ World Championship the next three years in a row, Ferrari’s most successful run until the Michael Schumacher era 25 years later.

When​ it came to drivers, the arc of Ferrari’s relationship with Niki Lauda, who won the Drivers’ World Championship in 1975 and 1977, is not untypical. In 1973, his second full Formula One season, the 24-year-old Austrian, racing for BRM, had come seventeenth in the Drivers’ Championship with only two points, having retired from nine races, failed to start one and never finished higher than fifth place. But his teammate, Clay Regazzoni, who had driven for Ferrari from 1970 to 1972 and was coming back for the 1974 season, suggested Lauda join him. With Montezemolo also on board with the idea, Ferrari agreed. Their faith quickly paid off. But after winning in 1975, and an incredibly strong start to the 1976 season, in August that year Lauda was in a horrific crash at the German Grand Prix. Four other drivers stopped to pull him out of his burning car. In a coma, with severe lung damage as well as two broken legs, his chances of survival seemed slim. But within six weeks, astonishingly, having missed only two races, he was back behind the wheel and came fourth at Monza. James Hunt, driving for McLaren, beat him to the championship by a single point. In the last race of the season, in Tokyo in October – the first ever Japanese Grand Prix – Lauda had retired after the first lap. He didn’t want to race on an unfamiliar track in torrential rain. Hard to blame him, mere weeks after he’d narrowly escaped death (hard to blame him anyway), but Ferrari never really forgave him. And even though Lauda won the 1977 Championship for Ferrari, they parted company at the end of the year on bad terms.

Lauda’s replacement was Gilles Villeneuve. Ferrari saw the same promise in him that he’d seen in Lauda a few years earlier. He also said the young Canadian reminded him of Nuvolari. Between 1978 and 1982 Villeneuve won six Grands Prix and had seven other podium finishes, and in 1979 came second in the Drivers’ Championship, beaten by his teammate Jody Sheckter, who led Ferrari to their sixth Constructors’ Championship win since 1960. Villeneuve was killed in May 1982, during a qualifying session for the Belgian Grand Prix. Fifteen years later, his son, Jacques, won the Drivers’ Championship with Williams.

Through the 1980s, Ferrari became more reclusive than ever. He hadn’t attended a race in person in decades, preferring to watch from home on TV. Since Laura’s death in 1978, he had acknowledged Piero Lardi as his son, allowed him to take his surname and given him an increasingly important role at the company. (Now eighty years old himself, Piero is still vice chair of Ferrari and owns the 10 per cent share in it that he inherited from his father. Enzo had sold most of the company to Fiat in the 1960s on the condition – not always strictly honoured – that he be allowed to retain sole control of the racing division without any meddling from Turin.)

In May 1983 Ferrari received a visit from the Italian president, Sandro Pertini, who arrived in a Maserati limousine. According to protocol, Ferrari was supposed to greet Pertini at the car. But he wouldn’t – ‘Enzo Ferrari cannot walk towards a Maserati’ – so the president got out of his car and walked over to greet Ferrari. (This is about as much postwar politics as you get in Dal Monte’s book, besides the occasional reference to inconvenient strikes or ‘the general crisis in the automotive sector’ in the mid-1970s. He keeps his eyes on the road.) One of the few visitors who managed to get the better of Ferrari was Paul Newman, a Ferrari owner, who came to see him in 1976 to take delivery of a 308 GTB and ask for advice on setting up a racing team. Ferrari wanted to talk about Hollywood actresses but Newman refused to be sidetracked and eventually Ferrari gave in and stuck to talking about cars. (In 1979 Newman was part of the team that came second at Le Mans, driving a Porsche.)

For his ninetieth birthday, Ferrari hosted a lunch for all his employees. A few months later, Pope John Paul II came to visit him. The papal helicopter landed at the Circuito di Fiorano, Ferrari’s private test track near Maranello, on the morning of 4 June 1988. Twenty thousand Modenese workers were there, from Ferrari and other local firms, even including Maserati. Piero drove the pope and the bishop of Modena around the track in a red Mondial convertible. John Paul performed Mass before going into the house in the middle of the track, where he met Piero’s wife, Floriana, and three-month-old baby, Enzo. But the baby’s grandfather wasn’t there: Ferrari was at home in bed with a fever. Unable to meet in person, the pope and the engineer spoke over the phone instead. Ferrari died two months later, on 14 August. He was buried in the family vault, in a small private ceremony, before the news of his death was made public.

Accepting an honorary degree from Modena University shortly before he turned ninety, Ferrari had quoted Woodrow Wilson’s prediction that ‘the 20th century would be the century of the automobile.’ Ferrari’s life was more or less coterminous with the glory days of the internal combustion engine. He was born just as Karl Benz was ramping up production at his car factory in Mannheim, and died the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established. The Mille Miglia was restarted as a heritage parade in 1977, open only to cars built before 1957: you may, as I have, spend a pleasant morning at a pavement café in the centro storico of one of the towns along the route admiring the museum pieces as they rumble majestically over the cobbles, though it’s also a relief when they’ve gone and pedestrians can return to the streets. A machine, and an industry, that used to look like a herald of the future is now an emblem of what we must leave behind if humanity is to have any future at all, however hard it may be to let go. A few weeks after my adventure at Vallelunga, a letter arrived from the comune of Magliano Sabina informing me that I’d been caught by a speed camera on the drive home, doing 77 kph in a 70 area. I should have taken the bus. L’auto è passata.