Musician and racing aficionado Chris Rea was disappointed with the original version of La Passione, a very personal Ferrari film project. Twenty years on he has remastered it on his own terms – and thrown in hitherto unseen footage from Wolfgang von Trips’ family archive

Cars and music: two passions that frequently intertwine. Quite a few racing drivers and car designers are, one discovers on getting to know them better, lovers of music. Their different tastes in sound often echo their varying approaches to finding an extra tenth of a second, or creating their next race winner. In the same way, when musicians achieve enough material success to indulge themselves, their four-wheeled choice usually reflects their music.

Thus Giuseppe Campari, twice Mille Miglia winner and victor in the French and Italian Grands Prix for Alfa Romeo, was dedicated to opera and possessed a fine baritone. Before he died at Monza in 1933 he had sung professionally. Leonard Bernstein, conductor, composer and musical director of the New York Philharmonic, used to terrorise the streets of Manhattan with his flamboyant driving of his Mercedes 300SL Gullwing, and while working in London drove an Aston Martin DB6 Vantage Volante with equal vigour. Antony Hopkins, not the actor but the pianist, composer and conductor, was an early owner of the 12th factory Lightweight E-type. He used it in hillclimbs and sprints and also drove it on the road: in the 1960s it was a common sight parked outside the Royal College of Music.

In jazz, Billy Cotton was a fine campaigner in MG K3 and ERA, as well as the ex-Segrave V12 Sunbeam. Belgian single-seater driver Johnny Claes’ other job in the 1940s was leading his band The Clay Pigeons. British racer and accessory dealer Les Leston was at one stage Claes’ drummer, winning a Melody Maker promising newcomer award. Trombonist Chris Barber, still leading a renowned jazz band today after more than 60 years, was a keen racer and then entrant from the 1950s to the 1970s, usually with Lotuses.

In rock music the roll-call of car nuts is headed by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, racer, collector and personality in historic motor sport. Beatle George Harrison was a frequent face at Grands Prix and tested a Lotus 18 at Donington, and on his eighth solo album the track Faster is dedicated to Ronnie Peterson. Most of the cars enjoyed by idiosyncratic singer and songwriter Neil Young, of Crazy Horse fame, have been American classics; but the one he remembers with most fondness is his 1934 Freestone & Webb-bodied Derby Bentley. Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, another of rock’s aristocracy, has a Maserati 300S among his collection, and races it in historic events. There are many more: you can add your own favourites to the list.

But Chris Rea takes things further. Renowned for his husky voice, his glorious bottleneck guitar technique and his creation of scores of haunting songs, he had his first big hit nearly 40 years ago. Since then he has sold more than 30 million albums worldwide, entirely made up of his own compositions, and he is still touring across Europe. He comes from Italian immigrant and Irish catholic stock, and grew up as one of seven children living in a cramped flat over the family coffee bar in Middlesbrough, where his father also made ice cream.

“My father, like a true Italian, told me that the Ferrari was the best car in the world. It was red, and it had 12 cylinders – when the Ford 8s and Morris Minors on the streets of Middlesbrough had four, and even our old Humber Imperial hearse, which was the only thing big enough to take the whole family, had just six. One fateful day in 1961, when I was 10, I nicked the current copy of Motor Sport from our dentist’s waiting room. In it were two pictures of Wolfgang von Trips, one driving the Ferrari shark-nose F1 car, the other his Targa Florio-winning 246SP.”

He has more than once used his love of racing as inspiration for his music, most notably in his tribute to Ayrton Senna, Saudade. Then in the 1990s his childhood memories found an outlet in an 84-minute sequence of connected songs about a small boy’s obsession with Ferrari and von Trips, which he called, appropriately enough, La Passione. He wove it into a script for an elaborate music video, using accurate replicas he commissioned of the Ferrari 156 shark-nose and the 246SP.

“We were well down the road with this, and then the shit hit the fan. Some senior executives at Warner Brothers, which was my recording company at the time and of course made movies too, decided to expand what I was doing into a complete film, with a linear story, for cinema release. I knew this was wrong, but effectively the whole project was taken off me. It went ahead with a director, full production team, professional actors and an elaborate story wrapped around my music. I hated how it turned out.” La Passione went on general release in 1996 and was panned by the critics, and its cinema exposure was short-lived.

“I defy anyone who played with toy racing cars as a kid not to identify with it completely”

Almost 20 years passed before Chris, “after a lot of shadow boxing”, was able to get the rights back – and during that interval something else happened. “I was on tour in Germany, and on a rest day between gigs I happened to be driving along a road west of Cologne when I saw a sign for the Wolfgang von Trips Museum. I found myself outside a castle. I went in, and lost myself in a treasure trove of his personal memorabilia, until there were tears running down my cheeks.

“I discovered that von Trips, in the last years of his life, had an 8mm film camera which he took with him everywhere. All that film still existed, masses of it, and had never been seen outside the family. They were very kind to me, and let me have access to it all. It showed my boyhood hero and his dream life – an aristocrat, living in a castle, surrounded by beautiful girls, and leading the Ferrari Grand Prix team.”

And now La Passione has reappeared, in an extraordinary package: two DVDs and two CDs, contained in a big-format hardback book. The CDs have the music from the film, remastered, and there are some new compositions, like Dino and Barn Find, which expand the theme of the album. The first DVD has the music with what is, for me, wonderful footage, some from the original film and some newly shot. It depicts a young boy using his imagination to build a motor racing fantasy. I defy anyone who played with toy racing cars as a kid, and dreamed about their full-size equivalents, not to identify with it completely.

It also includes interview material with Chris explaining what lay behind some of the tracks and why he put them together as he did. It’s emotional, it’s romanticised, some may say it’s self-indulgent, and purists may have objections: the Le Mans sequence, for example, deliberately includes some footage from Sebring, Kristianstad and Silverstone. But everything you see on the screen amplifies and enhances the music.

There’s a glorious impressionistic sequence showing the birth of a Ferrari GTO, from the first steel being poured to the final polish: most of the soundtrack with this is percussion only. Barn Find depicts everyone’s dream, finding a decaying GTO abandoned in a shed, which climaxes with some wonderful footage on the Montlhéry banking in the rain. Mixed in with this are unposed, informal clips of 1950s motor racing people, and also carefully researched stills – Dino, for example, includes rare pictures of Enzo Ferrari with his son. Vintage biplanes have a role too, complete with wing-walker.