Enzo Ferrari died in 1988, but his legacy continues to thrive. It’s been 16 years since one of Ferrari’s scarlet F1 cars won a Drivers’ World Championship, one less since the Scuderia secured a Constructors’ title. But Ferrari took outright victory at the 2023 Le Mans 24 Hours and the business is forecast to generate $6.4 billion in sales this year, selling around twice as many street cars as a decade ago.
More importantly, the mystique of Ferrari is intact. This common Italian surname evokes speed, passion and glamor in a way that its English equivalent, ‘Smith’ never could.
“Ferrari is an extraordinary thing, a phenomenon that I think will never be repeated in this industry,” says Stefan Johansson, who drove for Ferrari in Formula 1 in 1985 and 1986. “It was purely created by Enzo Ferrari, by his personality and, most of all, by his passion.”
The new Hollywood movie Ferrari is set around the 1957 Mille Miglia and stars Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz. We decided to find out more about working for the man dubbed Il Commendatore (the commander), or the “Old Man”, from drivers who raced his cars in two other eras – the 1960s and 1980s.
“Big John” Surtees
John Surtees was Ferrari’s second F1 Drivers’ World Champion of the 1960s after Phil Hill and remains the only racer to have won world championships on two wheels and four. I was fortunate to speak with him on a couple of occasions before his death in 2017. Surtees was warm, humble and generous with his time. At the Goodwood Revival in 2011, I waited for him to finish watching a motorcycle race before we began our conversation. We were then interrupted when fellow bike legend Giacomo Agostini wandered up for a chat in Italian. It was a pinch-yourself moment.
Surtees had just clinched his sixth and seventh Grand Prix Riders’ World Championships when he first went to meet Enzo Ferrari in late-1960. Ferrari had form in recruiting motorcycle racers, including Tazio Nuvolari and Piero Taruffi, so his interest in the British rider was not as unusual as might be the case now.
“It was very difficult to garner a first impression,” recalled Surtees. “The name and prestige of Ferrari at that time was very special. I’d been involved with Italians before [through motorcycle racing] and had experience of the Commandatore or director-type attitude that could exist. At times it had been very difficult to communicate with Count Agusta.
“When I first went in with Ferrari, it was a case of listening. He didn’t want to say much himself. I met him in Modena in the Assistenza Clienti (customer service department) where he had his office. There was a large table and a picture of his son Dino behind. Despite the office not being very bright, he still had his dark glasses on. I think [longtime advisor, Franco] Gozzi was there, too. They said, would I join the team? They outlined a programme of sportscars and Formula 1. I was to go to Maranello, meet the race department and meet with Engineer [Carlo] Chiti.
“I was a little concerned because they already had a long list of drivers there,” Surtees continued. “There was no specific structure to the team, as to who would drive which cars. It was very loose. I listened and I said ‘no, some other time’.
“I thought it was better because I had just stopped motorcycling and I was very new to cars. I’d done four Formula 1 races and already had a second place and a pole position in a Grand Prix. But it was still early. I remember someone saying, ‘ah, but we do not ask twice!’.”
They Asked Twice
Surtees went away to build his experience in car racing. Phil Hill won the drivers’ title for Ferrari in 1961, but the following year, Surtees’ Lola Mk4 finished ahead of Ferrari in the constructors’ standings.
“At the end of 1962 I received another telephone call, and this time it was very different,” he explained. “There was no Chiti. They said it was a new team, rebuilding, and they wanted me to be the lead driver for sportscars and Formula 1, to do the testing, etc. They were very down, and I thought it was the right time to go. I said I didn’t want number-one status in the contract, because I would be number one by being the fastest.”
Surtees won his first race for Ferrari, in a 250P sportscar at Sebring in 1963. But progress in F1 was slow, with the direct-injected V6’s power band and reliability usually proving inferior to the V8-powered Lotuses and BRMs. In his 1991 book World Champion, Surtees talked of Ferrari’s, “air of confidence, bordering on complacency,” at the time. Certainly, Enzo had a track record of technical conservatism, one example being his reluctance to switch to a rear-engined car despite being dominated by the Coopers in 1959-60.
For 1964, Surtees finally had the new V8-powered 158 at his disposal, yet he said he rarely felt it was the equal of his rivals’ machines. Against stiff opposition from the previous two champions – Jim Clark and Graham Hill – he secured the F1 championship title at the final race in Mexico City.
A Missed Opportunity
Soon however Surtees found himself a victim of the internal politics at the time, with team manager Eugenio Dragoni seemingly undermining the “close personal relationship” he had hitherto enjoyed with Ferrari himself. Dragoni had a track record of manipulation – allowed to flourish in part because of Enzo’s absence from the races – that had previously hastened Phil Hill’s departure from the team.
Surtees also felt that for more than a year, good results in sportscars and F1 had repeatedly been lost due to a lack of development and testing, because of mechanical failures or through questionable decisions by the team management.
“I had a good relationship with them, and I was happy at Ferrari – though not totally happy with the results and not totally happy with our isolation,” he told me. “Back in England you had Lotus, Cooper and Brabham piggybacking on each other and advancing. We were a little slow; I wanted them to push to make advances, to build a more modern type of chassis, which came up against some opposition. We improved a little bit with the stressed chassis in 1964 but again, we were still lagging technically behind.
“This was partly because of the isolation – we needed to bring in people from outside and make the team more international, which is exactly what happened later in the Schumacher period. Then you can harness the best of the Italian flair with ‘worldly’ input. The teams in Britain weren’t all-British – you had Australians [like Jack Brabham], New Zealanders [like Bruce McLaren], bits and pieces from everywhere. We needed to bring in some expertise. This brought me some problems and, in the end, partly led to me leaving the team in 1966.
“I was very sad to leave. I’d expected to see out my career there, but it wasn’t to be. One of the better things that Enzo Ferrari said was when I met him about 10 months before he died. He said, ‘John, we must remember the good times, and not the mistakes.’ I thought, OK, he at least appreciated there had been mistakes. Because we lost the opportunity to win one or two more championships together.
“There’s something special about Ferrari and there was something special about him, except that by the time I was there, he was too isolated,” Surtees concluded. “He’d stopped going to race meetings and was too removed from it, which in turn brought problems. But you have to respect Mr Ferrari for what he created. The prancing horse is now something that, throughout the world, is synonymous with Italy and Ferrari, and I’m proud to have been part of that. Part of me still remains in Modena and Maranello.”
Fast-Forward To The 1980s
Ferrari’s Formula 1 team struggled after Surtees left, emerging as a championship contender again only when Luca di Montezemolo took charge in the mid-1970s. Three titles followed for Niki Lauda and Jody Scheckter and there would likely have been another in 1982, had it not been for the accidents of Gilles Villeneuve (fatal) and Didier Pironi (fractured legs).
Especially in the early days, Enzo had a reputation for pitting drivers against one another to push them harder, but it’s clear that at times he also cared deeply for their wellbeing. Surtees wrote that the company’s insurance had taken care of Pironi in the aftermath of the accident at Hockenheim, just as it had in 1965 when Surtees himself had crashed heavily in a Can-Am race in Canada – driving a Lola!
By the time Swedish driver Stefan Johansson joined the team to replace the sacked René Arnoux after the first race of 1985, the Scuderia was into a 20-year title drought that would end only with the arrival of the foreign legion to which Surtees referred: notably team manager Jean Todt, ace driver Michael Schumacher, and engineers Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne.
Unable to secure a full-time F1 ride, Johansson had caught Ferrari’s attention in 1983-84 with a string of part-time appearances for Spirit, Tyrrell and Toleman.
“We’d been talking casually for almost a year about coming to do a test,” said Johansson, now an artist and driver manager, who spoke to me from his Los Angeles studio in November 2023. “Martin Brundle had got injured, so I replaced him at Tyrrell [for four GPs in 1984] and then Johnny Cecotto in the Toleman, too. I think the race that clinched it was the ’84 Portuguese Grand Prix, when I was dicing with Niki. I think the Old Man watching was what triggered it, and we started talking more seriously.”
In At The Deep End
After another cameo in the Tyrrell in the first race of the 1985 season in Brazil, he met Marco Piccinini, then team manager, at the Savoy Hotel in London to thrash out a deal. Johansson was released from his Toleman contract because the team had no tire supply, but the final details of the Ferrari switch required a trip to meet the boss. Now in his mid-80s, Enzo still had the final say on drivers.
“It all happened in the week before the Portuguese race,” Johansson continued. “I flew down on the Tuesday to meet Mr Ferrari. We met secretly in the old factory in Modena because they didn’t want anyone to see what was going on. And then we were on our way to the factory for a quick seat fitting at night. I did five or 10 laps around Fiorano on the Wednesday and then we flew to Portugal the next day for my first race with the team. Straight in at the deep end!”
He describes a dramatic first encounter that would have been familiar to Surtees.
“Meeting Ferrari lived up to everything I’d heard – the myth and the legend. The old factory is more or less abandoned, there is nothing there except some white sheets over some old cars. As you walk through the corridor into his office, there are no lights on. It’s like something out of a Fellini movie. The sunlight from the afternoon sun’s coming in and there’s all these photographs of Nuvolari, Farina, Fangio, all my big heroes. There he is in the back of his office and there’s still no lights, you can only see his silhouette. I don’t think anything was done on purpose. It was just how everything happened to be there.”
Ferrari hadn’t regularly traveled to Grands Prix for decades but through testing on the factory Fiorano track, Johansson saw a lot of the Old Man over the next two years.
“There was no simulator then, nor as much wind-tunnel testing. We tested two or three days every week at Fiorano between races, and every day, we had lunch together at the little house by the track there. We spent a huge amount of time together. Those were always great moments – a lot of good laughs and a very enjoyable atmosphere all the time.”
The Unseen Enzo
Ferrari’s popular reputation as the manipulating patriarch does not reflect the Enzo that Johansson knew. Instead, he paints a picture of his boss’s sociability and approachability.
“He loved telling his stories from his youth and career, it was a very relaxed environment the whole time,” said the 1997 Sebring and Le Mans winner. “I didn’t speak much Italian then so Piccinini or someone else had to translate, but those were incredibly enjoyable conversations. You certainly had the feeling that he really cared about his drivers, he enjoyed the company and the banter, the laughs, the jokes and the talking about the cars and engineering. Once we’d done that, it just went on to being a bunch of friends having a nice lunch. It could be a conversation about anything really.
“I think unfortunately, the media characterizes people in a certain way, based on assumptions, but very rarely is the person you read about the same person when you actually meet them,” Johansson continued. “They created this whole story about who he was. And I think part of it was that maybe because they didn’t really know who he was, they characterized him in a certain way.
“He was the master of spinning a narrative all the time, too. I think he knew exactly how to work the press. He talked in riddles half the time and I think they were too embarrassed to say, what the heck is Enzo talking about? So they wrote, ‘oh my God, he’s so intelligent’, or whatever. It’s a bit like Picasso with his paintings, when no one wanted to admit that they didn’t understand any of what he was trying to do. Instead, they revered him as the greatest artist in history!”
Johansson described feedback on his performance as, “an open dialog”, whether with Piccinini or Ferrari himself. He added, “There was never any feeling that we couldn’t talk about anything in general, it was more just however the conversation flowed. Remember, back then there was no email, text or anything like that, so everything was done face to face.”
Likewise, Johansson, who went on to run his own team in Indy Lights, CART, ALMS and ELMS, doesn’t assess the oft-written-about blame culture within Ferrari as any worse than what he experienced at any of the other nine teams for which he drove in a 12-season F1 career.
“You have it in every team in one way or the other, there’s always that battle between the levels of management. I think one of the main secrets of a successful team is when a group of people has the same dynamic and everybody works in unison. But that doesn’t happen that often unfortunately. There’s always conflict between people and their different ideas, different philosophies of how to get to the next level. At the start I was extremely intimidated by Mr. Ferrari. But once you had spent enough time with him, you had a dialog. Everybody was fighting for the same goal.”
Close To Victory
By his own admission, Johansson’s timing wasn’t great. The promise of the Ferrari 156/85 – in which teammate Michele Alboreto scored two wins and Johansson grabbed two second places – turned into the disappointment of the F1/86, in which neither he nor Alboreto won a race. “When we saw the car at the start of the 1986 season, we knew it was going to be a long year.”
The closest Johansson himself came to winning in Formula 1 was in only his second race with Ferrari, the 1985 San Marino Grand Prix at Imola. As an F1-obsessed kid I was excited to see Johansson rise through the field from 15th on the grid to take the lead with three laps to go, only to run out of fuel – one of six cars to do so in a chaotic finish.
“It sucked,” he told me with typical candor, “because if I ever drove a perfect race, that would have been it. I had a target number [for fuel mileage] and I was within that the whole time, even in the beginning when I was charging through the field. I was absolutely on target and the system told me I had enough fuel to make it.
“The team were hanging out pit boards, telling me to use more boost, but I knew I didn’t need to because I knew how much I was catching the guys in front. I just kept that pace and knew that I was going to get to them with about three or four laps to go – which I did, and I passed them, one after the other. Then it was just a matter of cruising home. But there was a crack in the inlet manifold, which was sucking in all this air so that the engine management was pushing more fuel in to compensate and keep the same mixture. Had we not had that, we would have won the race for sure.”
Despite his good relationship with the team, the Swede did find himself on the wrong end of some preferential treatment for his Italian teammate – an echo of what Surtees had experienced with Ludovico Scarfiotti in his latter days with Ferrari.
“There certainly were some moments. Ahead of the Italian Grand Prix in 1985, for example, Michele had allegedly slipped in the shower and hurt his hip, but I’m not sure, there could have been some other activity going on like motorcycling! But anyway, when I arrived at the track on Friday morning, they said, we want you to run Michele’s car today, because he couldn’t drive that first day. I got in and… the amount of horsepower that thing had!
“Monza was always a bit special with Ferrari, they always pulled something out of the bag for that one. But the next day, I was back in my car and in qualifying I couldn’t get within a second and a half of what I did in his car. I don’t know if that happened on more occasions than not, but it made me understand why it was especially hard to beat him in qualifying, as supposed to race conditions.”
Part Of The Family
Faced with an uncompetitive car and the chance to replace the retiring Keke Rosberg at world champions McLaren for 1987, Johansson left Ferrari. He said he then learned more in a season of working with Alain Prost than he had done in his entire F1 career to that point.
“I think truthfully, I arrived at Ferrari a couple of years too early in my career. It would have been better if I’d had at least two complete seasons with Toleman, for example, because I was so fresh and inexperienced in how you managed the car, the team, everything over the course of a race weekend.
“But if you disregard the competitive side of things, just having been a Ferrari driver – even to this day, almost 40 years later – is still an amazing experience that will never, ever go away. Once you’ve been part of that family, you’re always part of that family. And it’s a pretty special family, that’s for sure.”
Further Reading
- World Champion, by John Surtees. Hazelton Publishing. ISBN 0905138732
- Enzo Ferrari, A Life, by Richard Williams. Yellow Jersey Press. ISBN 9780224059862
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