Where their sons are concerned, mums have much to answer for. Certainly none other than Enzo Ferrari was deeply influenced, indeed in many ways shaped, by his formidable mother, Adalgisa (née Bisbini). She had been born to a well-to-do Forli farmer in 1872, and while her younger son (Enzo) would learn strength of purpose and a thirst for well-organised independence from his father, Alfredo, his relentless ambition and determination – plus the fortitude to overcome every setback which fate might present – seems certainly to have come from his mother.

The Ferrari parents had run a noisy household in north-eastern Modena. It was often riven by rumbustious dispute, husband shouting at wife and – in this case – aggrieved and absolutely unabashed wife screaming back at husband.

Their two young sons, Enzo and his older brother Alfredo, usually made themselves scarce when yet another row in the apparently endless series erupted. Both were active young lads, quite promising athletes, especially as sprinters, longer-distance runners and gymnasts.

Enzo also enjoyed football, and closely followed the fortunes of the local Modena FC team. He had aspirations to become a journalist, and even had a report of a Modena match published in the national La Gazzetta dello Sport.

But of course he became, above all else, entranced and absorbed by the motor car, and by motor sport. His family background promoted a competitive nature. His mother’s often demonstrated ability to stand up for herself perhaps contributed to his later proven veneer of autocratic self-confidence and sheer competitiveness. But other factors intruded into young Enzo’s development.

None were greater than the tragically early deaths not only of his father, but also his elder brother, both in 1916, his father in January and brother that December. Both succumbed to pneumonia even before the catastrophic flu epidemic which accompanied the end of the First World War. Poor Alfredo (junior) had evidently been Enzo’s example and anchor in many ways.

Mamma Adalgisa survived to oversee Enzo’s growth into his early maturity. But years later – when he was already fully established as master of his own fortune, company founder and principal – she retained the capacity to take him down a peg or two. Some of his contemporary staff would recall a visit to his office when voices became so raised during an exchange between mother and son that everyone in adjacent rooms could hear. That was, in fact, nothing unusual, since Ferrari’s standard post-race Tuesday meetings would often be conducted (on his part) at equally high volume. In this case, quite typically, Adalgisa had the last word – bawling loudly as she left that “He’s stupid! The bright one…” – brother Alfredo – “…died and this is what’s left!”.

“Amongst those who could not find peace at being beaten was the talkative Ferrari”

With such motherly support, who needs enemies? So one is left with the thought that much of Enzo’s career was perhaps dedicated, if largely subconsciously, simply – once and for all – to proving Mamma wrong.

He had developed as a physically imposing young man with a notably engaging and often persuasive manner. In later life he proved capable of switching this personality trait on and off as required. He could always be just as explosive, ill-tempered and argumentative as his mother when occasion or situation demanded – but he developed a wide and ever-widening circle of friends, especially throughout the Italian motor sporting fraternity. As for his staff, they came to admire and respect him. He engendered fierce loyalty, accompanied by matching detestation of his relentlessly demanding autocracy. Yet if any of his long-time workers were in trouble, he would repeatedly find some way to assist. There was then only one rule – keep any such act of kindness to yourself, lest everyone might expect it.

I was told of his having a conversation with one long-time employee in which he learned of the man’s disabled teenage daughter having been unable to get any support merely to get around outside the house. Within days a Mini saloon fitted for a disabled driver appeared outside her home – “just keep it to yourselves”. Typical of this other ‘Mr Ferrari’.

On a different level, during Ferrari’s fruitful collaboration with car stylist and bodymaker ‘Pinin’ Farina, ‘The Old Man’ used to give Farina’s son, Sergio, quite a hard time. Yet as time passed he developed respect for the younger man’s input. After Pinin’s funeral service, Ferrari engaged Sergio in a discreet private conversation and said quietly “From now on, you may address me as ‘tu’ not ‘lei’.”

In Italian ‘tu’ is the informal, effectively affectionate form of ‘you’, used with someone the speaker knows well, or as a family member, while ‘lei’ is the stiffer, formal address, used for someone the speaker does not know well, or who warrants the respect of older age. Where Ferrari was concerned Sergio Pininfarina had truly become accepted.

And upon a public level The Old Man funded the grandly titled Istituto Vocationale di Stato per l’Industria e l’Artigianato Alfredo Ferrari — IPSIA Alfredo Ferrari for short — not far from the factory in Maranello. This technical school was claimed to be the only one in Italy to train students specifically to work in the automotive industry. It would provide a flow of new talent to work at Ferrari… while serving as an enduring memorial to lost son Dino.

This is one of the many aspects of this man that I was almost tacitly encouraged to explore by several of his Italian former associates and colleagues during my research for the biography which Evro is launching this winter.

As early as 1920, when he drove a factory-entered Alfa Romeo in his second Targa Florio race on the island of Sicily, La Gazzetta dello Sport (October 30 issue) reported “Amongst those who could not find peace at being beaten was the talkative Ferrari. He had trained with great care and was piloting a car that had already won two races this year, indeed (team-mate) Campari at the last moment seemed sorry to have transferred (his car) to his younger team-mate… perhaps it was good fortune that Ferrari was assured of at least second place…” – in a race won by Guido Meregalli’s Nazzaro.

The realist in Ferrari, in fairness, certainly seems to have regarded this outcome as having been more to do with favourable circumstance than true driving talent. The important point, however, is that the 22-year-old aspiring racing driver brought his car to the finish and did well, pocketing 12,000 lire prize money.

That result was well received by the Alfa management, Nicola Romeo himself, Giorgio Rimini and by Ferrari’s friends and colleagues at the Milan factory. It was particularly embraced by established star driver Giuseppe Campari, who took a liking to the young upstart amateur. They would form a bond which endured through coming years.

Three weeks after the Targa, Ferrari made an impression upon another senior Alfa Romeo team-mate, Antonio Ascari. It was in a flying-start kilometre sprint meeting at Gallarate, when Ferrari was faster than Ascari and notched his first class win, in the Turismo category.

Afterwards, Ascari and Ferrari drove in convoy back to Milan, only for fog to close in. Suddenly, Ascari was confronted by a closed level crossing barrier. Ascari braked heavily… and Ferrari crashed straight into the tail of his car – never the ideal end to a day’s sport.

But it had been at Gallarate that Ferrari had seen the car which would most influence his subsequent story. It was an American 4.9-litre 130hp ‘Twin Six’ 299 V12, supposedly owned by Donna Maria Antonietta Avanzo and driven for her that day by Eugenio Silvani (who may alternatively have then been the owner, only subsequently selling it to the lady). Ferrari would remain awestruck by the magic of a V12-cylinder engine…

He returned to the Targa Florio in 1921, and again attracted favourable press comment. The journal Lo Sport Illustrato wrote “Ugo Sivocci and Enzo Ferrari were worthy of the mechanical jewels entrusted to them. Both achieved high expectations and aroused real enthusiasm amongst spectators at the classic Sicilian event”. Another magazine, Auto-Moto-Ciclo, ran an Alfa Romeo/Pirelli advert on its front cover, featuring a portrait photo of… Enzo Ferrari. He was developing celebrity status.

Two years earlier, in Turin, Ferrari had met Domenica Garello – known as Laura. His exploits as a racing driver had made him quite a star in his native Modena. He celebrated his stardom by cutting a swathe through the city’s female population, building a reputation as something of a wilfully naughty boy, with quite a Bohemian lifestyle. He began living there with Laura – cheerfully unmarried to the considerable distaste of abidingly Catholic society.

When Ferrari competed in the 1921 Coppa delle Alpi, effectively a rally, he was met at the winter ski resort of Madonna di Campiglio by Laura. On the event’s eighth day he happened upon a brutal road accident involving Ascari, who had crashed his Alfa off the Magno Pass while avoiding a horse-drawn carriage. Ferrari and Sivocci ended up driving the injured passengers to hospital before resuming their rally – the young Modenese still finishing with a class win.

He was learning rapidly – though his progress was interrupted soon after by a big accident of his own while practising for the delightfully named Gran Premio Gentlemen race outside Brescia. He rounded a corner to find the road ahead backed by a herd of cattle, sliding over the edge to somersault through trees down a steep hillside.

Something of Mamma Adalgisa surfaced as his loud criticism of the event organisers sparked a threat of lifetime disqualification from competition, only smoothed over by intervention from Silvio Crespi, President of the Automobile Club d’Italia.

Ferrari had invested much of his modest inheritance from his father into founding his own coachwork company – Carrozzeria Emilia – in Modena, but with Italy gripped by economic recession his lawyer friend Donati advised he really should cut his losses and sell. One senses that the humiliation cost Ferrari more than the financial loss. Gossip was that Mamma Adalgisa had sold assets of her own to settle her profligate son’s debts. For a proud still-aspiring racing driver – a man with a swagger – that must have been hard to bear. At least he could salvage his parallel business, selling Alfa Romeo cars from Modena’s Piazzale del Carmine.

But it was in 1923 that Enzo Ferrari, racing driver, truly emerged as a serious contender at Italy’s national level. He was also fully established as a personal friend (and admirer) of both Campari and (particularly) of Antonio Ascari.

On April 28 that year he finally married Laura. He would later remark, gloomily “There were about 20 guests, all invited by my wife. I was alone”. Mamma Adalgisa remained in Modena, disapproving.

Ferrari then won the Circuito del Savio road race outside Ravenna on June 17 that year. This was his first outright victory. It earned him 4000 lire, around £3000 by modern value. That win saw him introduced to Count Enrico Baracca and his wife, Countess Paolina. They were the parents of fallen World War I fighter pilot hero, Francesco Baracca. He had been a former cavalry officer whose Nieuport and SPAD aircraft had been famously emblazoned with his personal symbol – the Prancing Horse. Baracca’s parents allegedly urged Ferrari to use that symbol upon his Alfa Romeos. Yet the badge would not in fact appear on one his cars until the Spa 24 Hours race of 1932, fully nine years later. Perhaps the best ideas just take longer to germinate than myths and legends…

During that summer, Ferrari also demonstrated his persuasive ability to attract useful talent to Alfa Romeo. First he had brought in Ugo Sivocci from CMN. Now he won over the Fiat racing department’s senior mechanic Luigi Bazzi.

But in September 1923, Alfa’s latest Grand Prix car, the P1 designed by Giuseppe Merosi, proved a bad-handling disaster. On September 8 in pre-Italian GP testing at Monza, Ferrari’s friend and sometime mentor Sivocci crashed his Alfa P1 into a tree in the Curva Vialone. Ferrari, manager Giorgio Rimini and their team members reached the scene to find badly injured riding mechanic Angelo Guatta weeping over Sivocci’s dead body. Ferrari instinctively took charge, commandeered a British spectator’s two-seater car and rode on its spare-wheel carrier to hospital with Guatta, by this time unconscious, in the passenger seat. Losing Sivocci, who had become a virtual surrogate older brother to him, must have been a horrible blow, but one that tempered Ferrari’s inner steel. Many such tragedies would follow, hard-laminating Ferrari’s shell into absolute armour-plate.

With the Merosi P1 deemed inadequate, Nicola Romeo sought a replacement chief engineer. Bazzi told Ferrari that 32-year-old Fiat designer, Vittorio Jano, might be ripe for picking. Ferrari made an initial approach, and would then make Jano an offer he could hardly refuse – 3500 lire per month, plus accommodation in Milan, against his Fiat pay in Turin of 1800 a month.

Jano promptly joined Alfa Romeo, brimming with ideas. His arrival proved a profound turning point for the brand. And the self-promoter in Enzo Ferrari made the most of that coup.

In 1924 the engineer’s P2 cars toppled Fiat’s Grand Prix domination. That same year saw Ferrari win again at Savio, and at Polesine. The major Coppa Acerbo race at Pescara followed, and Ferrari won there too after Campari’s team-leading P2 had retired. La Gazzetta dello Sport enthused “In the strong hands of the young Enzo Ferrari we saw a superb display of regularity, speed and power… the red car ran without any arrest of the driver’s booming heart…”. This was Ferrari’s third consecutive win of the year, and by far his most major. Not least it persuaded Alfa Romeo to announce that he would be joining Ascari, Campari and French veteran Louis Wagner as a ‘reserve’ works driver for the upoming French GP at Lyon.

Over 50 years later, at the end of the 1976 Formula 1 season, Ferrari conducted his annual press conference at Maranello. It was held the week after his star driver Niki Lauda’s abdication of the Drivers’ World Championship in the rain-swept Japanese GP, which he had controversially abandoned ending the second lap, leaving James Hunt of McLaren to take the crown. Lauda had in any case made a miraculous comeback after near-fatal mid-season injuries in the German GP. His barely healed burns had affected his eyelids and skin grafts left him battling for clear vision in flying spray. The Italian press harried Ferrari for his reaction to Lauda’s withdrawal of a fully functioning car.

He finally declared: “I have experienced what Lauda has been through, only in smaller proportion, and I know only too well what it is like to give up a passion cultivated in the years of adolescence and youth”.

Pursued by the press to name any other driver who had ’simply given up’, Ferrari parried and drew on his own past.

“Yes” he snapped: “I know of a driver. His name was Enzo Ferrari! I was to go to the Lyon Grand Prix in France where I had to drive the fourth car. At the time I suffered a nervous breakdown and I had the guts to say to myself ‘I have tried the circuit, have since had to go back – but I can’t make it’. And so I cabled and off I went…”.

In launching this riposte he had told the assembled pressmen “You don’t believe me because you are young men…”. He would often, in these later years, play off his unmatched decades of experience against their relative naivety.

One of the pressures upon him had been the responsibility and tension in his marriage to a ‘difficult’ wife. Laura, reputedly, had been demanding he spend more time in Modena, building a future for them both, especially since he had just launched Alfa sales sub-agencies in Bologna, Faenza, Ferrara, Parma and Reggio Emilia.

By September 1924 he was recovered sufficiently to be in charge of his business in Piazza del Carmine, and within a year he was running a more grand operation, Garage Gatti, promoting his own name and honorary rank – awarded by the state for his Pescara victory, Cavaliere Ufficiale Enzo Ferrari, exclusive concessionaire for Alfa sales in Emilia and Romagna.

Ferrari leavened his convalescence by submerging himself in business. He and Laura lived – during the brief periods when she was not away dealing with her own demons or caring for her mother (who died in June 1925) – in a cramped second-floor apartment above a restaurant in Modena. He remained a natural celebrity within local motoring circles. He spent time in both Bologna and especially Milan. He stayed there in the Hotel Cavour. His extramarital exploits in both cities might have become open gossip in a less strictly Catholic, conservative and surprisingly discreet society than 1920s Italy.

Into 1925 while he continued to build his Modena-based dealership, the international governing body – the FIA’s contemporary equivalent, the AIACR – initiated a World Championship for competing makes. But at the French GP, Antonio Ascari crashed fatally. In Italy his loss sparked deep national grief. Ascari’s death was another shattering blow to Ferrari. Following Sivocci’s he had lost another mentor and friend.

Into 1926, political change and economic pressures backed Alfa Romeo’s banks in ousting Nicola Romeo. In Modena, Enzo Ferrari had become the local football club’s MD. The President of the National Football Federation was prominent fascist personality Leandro Arpinati – who became perhaps Ferrari’s most prominent customer for Alfa Romeo cars. Ferrari far-sightedness was becoming apparent…

Into 1927 he regained sufficient confidence to resume racing. He had achieved some stability in his marriage to Laura and her – previously fragile – relationship with Mamma Adalgisa who lived with them had improved. On May 15, 1927, he drove at Alessandria, scoring a comeback victory. At such national level, Ferrari could be confident that his driving talents had found their proper niche. Despite heavy rain he then won in hometown Modena, benefiting not least from tyres which he had hand-grooved himself. He had learned many tricks of the trade.

Before the 1928 Italian Grand Prix he enjoyed a conversation with driver Emilio Materassi. That afternoon Materassi crashed his Talbot, killing himself and 22 luckless spectators in the worst motor racing disaster to that time. Ferrari knew that Materassi’s team had been backed jointly by wealthy Florentine supporters.