Go Like Hell

by A. J. Baime

  The relationship between the battle for speed and the battle for market share didn’t sit well in Washington. In 1957, Congress forced the Automobile Manufacturers Association to draw up a “Safety Resolution,” a treaty by which Detroit automakers agreed not to advertise “the specific engine size, torque, horsepower, or ability to accelerate or perform, in any contest that suggests speed.” “Safety” and “economy” became the buzzwords of the day.

  And yet, Doc Greene’s column in the Detroit News spoke of high-powered automobile executives showing up in bunches at the Daytona 500 in 1961. “The executives you see just happened to be passing through on the way to Texas or Dubuque or somewhere and you didn’t see them at all. And the things they say are off the record.” One “wheel within a wheel” was quoted: “Racing without cooperation from the parent company is like having a baby without an umbilical cord. Almost impossible.”

  That summer General Motors’ investment in racing became the worst-kept secret in Detroit. Chevrolet was funding a racing campaign under the guise of a marine engine program. Pontiac had its own secret program.

  “These guys are cheating,” Henry II told Iacocca. “We have to do something.”

  Henry II refused to spend money on racing, fearing bad publicity. He was president of the Automobile Manufacturers Association. Enforcing the Safety Resolution fell to his authority.

  By the end of 1961, Iacocca’s first year on the job, Pontiac and Chevrolet had won forty-one out of fifty-two NASCAR races. Over that same year, General Motors’ share of the market began to skyrocket. Pontiac reported its highest new model sales in its thirty-six-year history. In April, Chevrolets won at Richmond, Columbia, Greenville, and Winston-Salem. Over that same thirty-one days, Chevrolet set an all-time single-month sales record. “Not since the heyday of Henry Ford’s Tin Lizzie has any auto line so completely dominated the market,” Newsweek reported. “One of every three cars that Americans drove out of showrooms last week was a Chevrolet.”

  Anxiety began to cloud the hallways of the Glass House. Since Henry II took over the company, he’d never seen such an immediate and critical shift in market share. Ford executives saw stories in their newspapers about young people who were taking to the streets and marching, demanding legal drag strips in their hometowns. Kids wanted speed, and General Motors made the hottest engines money could buy.

  On April 27, Henry II penned a letter to John F. Gordon, president of General Motors. “On a short-range basis we intend to develop those high-performance components for the Ford car that are presently offered by Chevrolet and Pontiac,” he wrote. “We believe this action is mandatory to assure the competitive position of our products. On a long-range basis we are most anxious to work out a more satisfactory agreement with other members of the industry.”

  Henry II never received a reply.

  In the first third of May 1962, GM’s slice of the pie hit 61.6 percent, up from 49 percent a year before. Not in forty years had one company cut out such a large chunk. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had a grand jury looking into antitrust laws. From his fifth-floor office at Ford division headquarters, Iacocca saw Ford spiraling under his watch. He had worked his whole adult life to get this job. He urged his boss to scrap the Safety Resolution—out of necessity.

  “Now I don’t want to imply that we were building old ladies’ cars,” Iacocca later said. “But something had to be done. I had only one thing in mind. We had to beat hell out of everybody.”

  It was an easy sell. Henry II saw not a company but a family legacy in peril. An attack on Ford was an attack on the Ford family. How many times had Henry II heard the story as a child, how the family legacy was founded? One cloudy Thursday many years before, on October 10, 1901, an unknown tinkerer named Henry Ford stepped into a machine he had built, at a racetrack in Grosse Pointe. A crowd of six thousand had gathered to see a sweepstakes race between this unknown tinkerer and Alexander Winton, holder of the world track speed record and the most famous name in speed of his day. Henry Ford didn’t believe in racing; he thought it irresponsible. “But as others were doing it, I too had to do it,” Henry I later described this moment. “If an automobile was going to be known for speed, then I was going to make an automobile that would be known wherever speed was known.”

  Henry I won the race. He gambled his life on it and prevailed, and this victory put a new carmaker named Henry Ford on the map. What would history be if Crazy Henry had come in second?

  On June 11, 1962, Henry II released a statement—six paragraphs with his signature at the bottom—regarding Detroit’s Safety Resolution. “Accordingly,” he told reporters that day, “we are withdrawing from it.” Anticipating criticism from Washington, he asserted that the company would “continue with unabated vigor our efforts to design, engineer and build safety into our products.” Off the record he was more to the point.

  “We’re going in with both feet.”

  It was, in the words of one Detroit reporter, “the biggest automotive scoop in years,” and reaction was immediate. Representative Oren Harris, Democrat of Arkansas, promised an investigation by the House Health and Safety Subcommittee. Editorials probed Henry II’s motivations. “Detroit’s romance with racing has always been a strange one,” the New York Times stated. “Cynics say it is a romance of desperation, pursued only when other approaches don’t bring satisfaction in the salesroom.”

  Henry II knew that, if Ford was going to lead the charge, the other companies would likely follow. Competition would move from the boardrooms and showrooms to the track. Losing was out of the question.

  2

  Il Commendatore

  I am convinced, that when a man tells a woman he loves her, he only means that he desires her; and that the only total love in this world is that of a father for his son.

  —ENZO FERRARI, 1963

  THROUGH HIS WINDSHIELD, the city of Modena, Italy, came into focus: rows of stone buildings, telegraph wires, the towering spire of the Duomo poking at an iron-gray sky. The maze of teeming ancient streets pulled him in as if by a force of gravity.

  His name was Enzo Ferrari and he was fifty-eight years old. He made the famous cars that bore his name, and yet he drove a Fiat the 11 miles home from his factory. Once he arrived in the city, the streets clogged with traffic: Fiats like his own, Lancias, an occasional Ford. Bumpers scraped and scooters swarmed. It was a June evening in 1956. The setting sun reddened the horizon but the early-summer heat was still baking Modena.

  Turning onto the Viale Trento e Trieste, his Fiat lurched to a stop on a corner in front of number eleven. This was his home—a two-story painted stone structure with two Shell gas pumps out front skirting the road. On the first floor were the garages, big enough for a half dozen automobiles, where his customers came to have their Ferrari cars serviced. He kept an office on one side, a small chamber with a desk, a well-worn brown leather chair, and a trophy-lined bookcase.

  He climbed a stairwell to the second floor, where he resided with his wife Laura and their only child, a son named Alfredo—Dino for short. The walls embraced Ferrari like the fabric of his old suit. He had not strayed from these rooms for a single night in perhaps more than a decade. His wife Laura’s sad face at the end of the day was as familiar to him as the furniture. They seemed to have a relationship that neither enjoyed but neither could do without.

  Was there any news?

  There was not, she informed him. The doctor had come and the doctor had gone. What was there to say?

  Ferrari walked into his son’s room. Dino’s six-foot frame filled his bed. He was twenty-four and he’d been born into this home. The older man’s skin had leathered and his dark hair had grayed, but the two still shared the same features: prominent forehead, aquiline nose, hair bristling back as if it were being blown by a steady breeze. They were unmistakably father and son. Ferrari eased himself into the chair that had become a fixture by Dino’s bedside and time slowed to a crawl.

  Conversation started where it had ended
the evening before. Ferrari updated Dino on what was happening at the factory, whom had visited, the business of the day. It was June, which meant Le Mans approached, the most important race of the year. In the frenzy to ready the cars the daylight hours moved at breakneck speed. There was always disagreement. Bazzi had said this . . . Jano had said that . . . In the racing shop, voices could sometimes drown out the rattle of a sick engine. Throughout his years Dino Ferrari had asked his father about the cucciolo, the “puppy.” He liked to call his father’s latest creation the puppy. Ferrari was building the 625 LM to race at Le Mans in 1956 and he detailed the progress.

  Inline four cylinder, 2.5 liters, two Weber carburetors. . .

  By the bed, Ferrari kept a notebook. Inside he had scribbled charts and graphs tracking the number of calories his son had consumed on a given day, his diuresis, the presence of albumin in his urine and of urea in his blood. Visits from a doctor enabled Ferrari to update the figures frequently. Like an engine on a test bed, Dino’s numbers measured vitality and strength.

  Ferrari had always believed that the young man’s problems could be solved. Even in those late hours, he believed his son could be saved.

  Dino Ferrari had lived his entire life in a world of experimental automobiles. From his earliest days he could be seen following his father around in the garages below their home and at the local proving ground, the Modena Autodrome. He was in his early teens when he began suffering from strange maladies. Doctors eventually diagnosed him with muscular dystrophy,* a crippling disease with no cure that eats away at the skeletal muscles.

  Ferrari groomed his son. Dino earned his engineering diploma at a technical institute in Modena, and unlike his father he learned to speak English. He took an office near his father’s and began to assume his role as the aging boss’s only son.

  “Papa,” he said when he saw Ferrari upset about a business matter. “Don’t let it get you down. Things always right themselves if you only give them time.”

  By the end of 1955, Dino’s twenty-four-year-old legs had grown so stiff he had trouble walking, and his kidneys began to fail. He was confined to his bed.

  Frequent visitors came to sit with Dino—his best friend Sergio, and drivers on Ferrari’s Grand Prix team. The filmmaker and avid Ferrari customer Roberto Rossellini came bearing books, and he sat by Dino’s bed for hours. Dino’s most important visitor came at night. After sunset Enzo Ferrari returned home from the factory with a man named Vittorio Jano. Jano was in his mid-sixties and always dressed in his trademark three-piece wool suit and bowler hat. He was the most famous engineer in Italy. In the 1930s, Jano had designed the Alfa Romeo P3 monoposto, the first true single-seat racing car. In a sport that was as much about mechanical wizardry as it was about the skill of drivers, Jano’s cars had made Italy the nation to beat. His contribution to Ferrari’s rise was immeasurable. Ferrari could still recall the day, thirty-three years before, when he first climbed the stairs to Jano’s home and knocked on the door.

  In Dino’s room, the three men resolved to design a 1.5-liter racing engine. The challenge: to achieve the perfect equilibrium between power and economy of motion. Racing historians would forever debate exactly what occurred in that room. Ferrari would claim that his son was achieving greatness on his deathbed, though some argued Jano’s genius was at work.

  As the engine took shape on paper, and the young man’s condition deteriorated, a macabre irony became apparent. For Enzo Ferrari, the internal-combustion engine was a symbol of life. It had revolutionized society. He had watched it all happen during his lifetime. He spoke of automobiles as if they were animate. Cars possessed unique behaviors. They breathed through carburetors. They were skinned with metal. “Ferrari’s aim,” he once told a reporter, addressing himself in the third person, “is to perfect an ideal, to transform inert raw material into a living machine.” The engine of a car was both heart and soul. Ferrari engineer Luigi Bazzi had called its rumble “the heartbeat of the creature.”

  Spread out around the Ferrari home, the city of Modena was going about its routine. A thriving colony since the days of Caesar, Modena (MO-deh-na) was settled on the Via Emilia, a strategic road that cut a path straight to Rome. Modena’s population in 1955 was 150,000, roughly the size of Yonkers, New York, today. It was a city of cobblestone alleys and paved streets winding from the Piazza Grande, where a statue of the Madonna held court next to the Duomo, built in the twelfth century, its tower now slightly tilted.

  Italians singled out Modena for its zampone (stuffed pig’s feet), a sparkling red wine called Lambrusco, balsamic vinegar, and a lousy soccer team called II Canarini—the Canaries. Its true fame, however, was its craftsmen. “Absurdly gifted artisans abound,” the historian Griffith Borgeson described the city, “so that you can have almost anything made, made surpassingly well, and so cheaply that you must never get used to the miracle. It’s an incredible place, where master pattern makers are a dime a dozen and skilled metal workers of every kind seem to surge out of the black humus.”

  As in all Italian cities and towns, the Modenese held beauty in great esteem. Everywhere it was evident, from the Renaissance architecture to the label on a bottle of Lambrusco. Modena’s metal workers possessed a talent for mechanics as well, an instinctive ability to design and mold moving parts. In this city, an old-world aesthetic was joined by modernity’s defining ambition: to harness power. “It is my opinion,” Ferrari once wrote, “that there are innate gifts that are a peculiarity of certain regions and that, transferred into industry, these propensities may at times acquire an exceptional importance . . . In Modena, where I was born and set up my own works, there is a species of psychosis for racing cars.”

  The city’s streets and alleys were lined with coach-building shops and foundries. Maserati, among the world’s most storied racing marques, had its headquarters here on the Via Ciro Menotti. The famous Weber carburetors were built in nearby Bologna, also the home of motorcycle fabricator Ducati. Just a few miles down the road from Modena in Sant’Agata Bolognese, a prominent tractor manufacturer would soon unveil a phenomenal first car, his name Ferruccio Lamborghini. It was Enzo Ferrari, however, who was emerging as the region’s most revered mechanical impresario.

  Ferrari was a metal worker’s son; his name came from the Italian word ferro, meaning iron. He could describe himself as neither a designer nor an engineer, but rather “an agitator of men.” Mornings found him exiting his apartment wearing a plain baggy suit, suspenders holding up his pants. On his wrist was an old chronometer with the black Prancing Horse—the Ferrari logo—in the center of the dial. He visited his barber Antonio for a shave, then drove a Fiat 11 miles to the rural village of Maranello, where an Alsatian named Dick greeted him at his factory gate, tail wagging. The factory porter Seidenari—whom Ferrari’s wife called “Sei di Denari” (“You have money”)—snapped to attention in the porter’s lodge. The boss’s office was there by the gate, so he knew who was coming and who was going.

  He worked seven days a week, twelve to sixteen hours a day, holidays included. At night, he returned to Modena. He felt “extremely emotionally attached” to his city. Except for his daily drives to Maranello, he refused to leave Modena for almost any reason. He did not attend races—not even the Italian Grand Prix at the Monza Autodrome, one of the world’s most famous circuits, a two-hour drive from his home.

  The factory produced just a few cars each week, of three different kinds: two-seat racing sports cars of the Le Mans type, missile-shaped single-seat Grand Prix cars (increasingly being called Formula One at this time), and Grand Touring cars (customer road cars). Paying for it all was a rarified group of clients, who commissioned their cars as if they were pieces of art and paid Enzo Ferrari extraordinary amounts for them: the president of Argentina Juan Domingo Perón, the Shah of Iran Reza Pahlavi, the playboy Porfirio Rubirosa and his mistress Zsa Zsa Gabor. When they came to Modena to take possession of their vehicles, they always stayed a little longer to meet Ferrari. They addres
sed him by the title the Italian government had given him in 1927 —Commendatore.

  To the journalists who sought to define him in their articles, Ferrari was a riddle: A man who built racing cars, but refused to attend races. Who worked tirelessly to perfect state-of-the-art machines, yet feared elevators. They called him The Magician of Maranello, a “speed-bewitched recluse.” But here in his home city, where he had grown up, there was no mystery. He looked and dressed like any other man sitting in the cafes of the Piazza Grande. He was a Modenese, a paesano.

  On June 30, 1956, a priest arrived at 11 Viale Trento e Trieste. Dino was dying, and the priest came to sit with his parents through the final hours. In the chair by Dino’s bedside, Ferrari sat with his son. They talked, and from their conversation, Ferrari learned, as he would later describe, “what life means to a young man who is leaving it.”

  When Dino had taken his last breath, Ferrari opened the notebook that he had filled with charts and graphs and wrote one final sentence: “The match is lost.”

  “I have lost my son,” he said.

  “Let us say a prayer for our Dino, who has left us,” the priest said.

  “Since I took First Communion as a child I have forgotten the prayers that so many people say every day,” Ferrari responded. “The only thing I can say is: God, help me to be a good man.”

  The following day, drivers in Ferrari’s red livery competed in the French Grand Prix wearing white armbands in Dino’s honor. The British driver Peter Collins won the race for the Ferrari factory team, traveling 121.16 mph over 314.5 miles—the fastest average speed over any European circuit in history. When the phone call arrived, Ferrari waved it away. He claimed that racing no longer had meaning for him and announced that he would give it up forever. No one believed him.