Ferrari and its actual enduring legacy...
Posted
by
Riccardo Paterni
on
13/04/2026
"When Enzo Ferrari established his eponymous company in 1947, creating a luxury brand was the furthest thing from his mind. He was obsessed with building the world’s fastest cars to conquer the booming world of auto racing.
To do that, he also built a clever business model. Like many of his rivals, he built cars for his own racing team and sold them on the side.
But unlike Mercedes or Ford, whose racing garages and consumer car factories might as well have been located on different planets, the same Ferrari employees in the hills of Maranello, Italy, built substantially the same cars, whether they were selling them to customers or racing them at Le Mans.
The model created a beautiful feedback loop. Scuderia Ferrari’s success in Grand Prix races stoked greater awareness and desire for private client road cars. The profits from those client sales fueled the research and development that turbocharged La Scuderia’s performance back on the track.
It was a fantastic strategy through the 1950s and 1960s filled with F1 championships and notable clients.
But by the time Enzo died in 1988, the business was struggling. After a 50% sale of the company to Fiat in 1969, Ferrari was losing money and furloughing workers due to a misguided strategy of overproduction.
The company’s future was very much in doubt when it found a savior in Enzo’s one-time protégé, Luca di Montezemolo. The visionary Montezemolo saw immense potential lying in the wreckage of Ferrari’s road-car business.
Instead of positioning the product as a domesticated race car, he realized this was Ferrari’s chance to sell something less tangible but infinitely more valuable: the fulfillment of every fan’s childhood dreams."
From The Wall Street Journal - April 10th 2026