How Enzo Ferrari Created the Greatest Racing Team in Motorsport History!

Ferrari founded a Formula 1 juggernaut and a world-renowned supercar company while juggling enormous personal tragedy.

By Bob Sorokanich

Ferrari may be the most recognizable supercar manufacturer on earth. Throughout its 80-plus-year history, the company has introduced some of the most legendary and desirable sports cars ever made. Hard to believe, but founder Enzo Ferrari viewed the road-car company as something of a necessary distraction, a way to make money to support his ultimate lifelong passion: Racing. This is the story of the intensely private, ruthlessly domineering, obsessive, and somewhat tragic figure who founded a juggernaut Formula 1 team, and then built the world’s most highly-desired sports cars to support it.

Enzo Anselmo Giuseppe Maria Ferrari was born in February 1898 in Modena, a city in northern Italy. The Ferrari family were working-class people—Enzo’s father Alfredo had a small workshop where he did fabrication and mechanical work for the local railroad. Enzo had little formal education, instead working alongside his father in the workshop. When he was 10 years old, Enzo witness the event that would set him on the course of his life’s work: He watched as Italian racing driver Felice Nazzaro won first place in the 1908 Circuito di Bologna, an automobile race held on the roads of the nearby city of Bologna. From then on, Enzo Ferrari dreamed of becoming a racing driver.

Ferrari served in World War I with the Italian army, but was discharged in 1918 after becoming gravely ill during the flu pandemic that swept through Europe. He had already been subject to great personal loss, witnessing as his father and his older brother Alfredo Jr., known in the family as Dino, died from the flu. Family tragedy would come to define Enzo Ferrari’s life.

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