Enzo Ferrari’s life revolved around lire – making it and saving it, with raised voices often involved
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According to Niki Lauda, after he had named the fee – in Austrian schillings – that he wanted to sign up for the 1977 Formula 1 season, Mr Ferrari telephoned his accounts man, Della Casa, to ask what the conversion would be into currency he understood.
Having digested the news he turned to Niki and bawled “You insolent pig, how dare you! Are you crazy? We have nothing more to say to each other.” His son Piero dutifully translated, then attempted to calm his father while also seeking to make the driver’s demands perhaps more palatable. Niki suggested ‘The Old Man’ make a counter offer. After much grumbling and some bad language an offer was made, some 25% less than the Austrian had asked.
It then became Lauda’s turn to explode, telling Piero that team manager Daniele Audetto had offered him a few million lire more. The Old Man called Audetto, angrily, to check. It was true. Mr Ferrari then calmed down, though plainly wounded by having been so undermined, telling Lauda “It’s mad. It’s too much, enough is enough. Think about my nerves. Are you trying to kill me?”
Another hour or so of often animated negotiation followed. Lauda dropped his demand a percentage point. After further ear-splitting outrage from Ferrari he accepted a further 4% drop. And Mr Ferrari reluctantly and quietly said: “OK.
Niki remarked upon the transformation, “suddenly he is pleasant and friendly again. A charming old man, the most delightful company anyone could imagine”.
“You insolent pig, how dare you! We have nothing more to say to each other”
In fact Mr Ferrari had long-since learned how to make his own racing pay as a driver. In 1920, he did well with an Alfa Romeo in his second Targa Florio road race on Sicily, earning 12,000 lire cash. Then in 1923 at the Circuito del Savio he scored his first race win outright. It paid him 4000 lire – then just under the modern equivalent of £3000.
He hit the big time by winning the Coppa Acerbo race at Pescara in 1924. That earned him a place in the Alfa Romeo works team to contest the year’s French Grand Prix at Lyons. But after practising there he famously opted out, citing a nervous breakdown. He returned home to concentrate upon growing his Alfa Romeo dealership, abandoning further racing until 1927. At national level he then began to win again, and in 1928 earned 45,000 lire from just three events, good for 10th in the year’s Italian drivers’ earnings list.
When he founded his Scuderia Ferrari team to run predominantly Alfa Romeo cars as a co-operative for wealthy clienti, he charmed a loan of 1m lire from the local Modenese San Geminiano bank.
During his Scuderia Ferrari years from 1930, The Old Man collided with the new wave of Third Reich-backed Grand Prix competition from Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union. When Alfa Romeo refused to release its Tipo B Monoposto (‘P3’) cars to the Scuderia in mid-1933, Mr Ferrari wangled a deal to secure them. Six cars plus a convoy of trucks carrying spares, and some key personnel, all arrived in Modena. Still they were no gift. The price is alleged to have been some 1.7m lire, then around £28,000 or in today’s terms in the vicinity of £2.6m.
Come 1935, when Achille Varzi abandoned the Scuderia to join Auto Union, Ferrari responded by publishing in the illustrated journal Lo Sport Fascista the enigmatic Italian’s earnings. For his Scuderia drives through a seven-month racing season, Varzi had earned 600,000 lire. In January 1935 that converted to around £10,000. By modern values Varzi had earned a little more than £900,000. In Italy, public support and sympathy for him plummeted…
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During wartime, Ferrari gave 1500 lire to all his workers who had joined the partisans, and also to all partisans who were former Ferrari employees. It’s easy to regard this cynically as mere insurance but it’s immensely significant that he was regarded within Modena at the time as “a worker’s friend”, somebody enlightened, and looking “further than his factory”.
When he was founding his own motor manufacturing company in Modena just postwar, within a very different world, he was paying his first successful contracted driver (cum-former-grinding machine salesman) Franco Cortese 600,000 lire plus 50% of all start and prize monies earned. Both parties emerged content.
When he persuaded the ageing Italian superstar Tazio Nuvolari to drive one of his new V12 sports cars in two local races, ‘Nivola’ slipped his Cisitalia ties in return for a fee of 145,000 lire plus 50% of any prize money, which he promptly secured for the greater glory of… Ferrari.
When Clemente Biondetti won the 1948 Mille Miglia, no less, for Ferrari, The Old Man (then aged 50) recognised co-driver Giuseppe Navone’s role for having talked Biondetti – demoralised by having fallen 20 minutes behind Nuvolari’s version – into pressing on. He did, Nuvolari’s cycle-mudguard 166 Spider Corsa fell apart, and Biondetti/Navone won. Mr Ferrari was so elated he wrote Navone a cheque for 100,000 lire on the spot. He’d certainly had practice by the time Niki Lauda reported for ’77 – hand outstretched.
