Ford Would Like
to Buy Ferrari
In the mid-1960s, Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari decided they couldn’t stand each other.
It was a completely different era in the auto industry, long before the gas crisis of the 1970s and the arrival of Japanese and German brands in the U.S. market. The Detroit Big Three ruled America, and there was even room for a fourth player, American Motors Corporation (AMC), run by George Romney, who would go on to be governor of Michigan (and whose son, Mitt, would be Massachusetts governor and a two-time presidential candidate). In the 1950s, the elder Romney’s claim to fame was overseeing the rollout of the AMC Rambler, a relatively small car by the standards of a decade known for excessive chrome and flamboyant tail fins on cars whose front ends seemed to arrive five minutes before their rears.
The Rambler was called the “dinosaur fighter,” and it presaged the battle the prehistoric Big Three would fight in the 1970s. (AMC would become even more famous during that decade when it acquired the World War II Jeep brand from Kaiser, another U.S. automaker operating in the shadow of the Big Three; Jeep would later become Chrysler’s most important brand, after AMC was absorbed in 1987.)
Imports, in those days, were from Europe. The Volkswagen Beetle had arrived in 1949 as a one-off import. VW would set up shop in the United States in 1955, and the car really took off in the 1960s. Like the Rambler, the Beetle was a counterpoint to the enormous sedans the Big Three were selling.
But the Beetle wasn’t a sports car, and that’s what the Big Three thought of when they thought about Europe. As BMW wouldn’t introduce the sports sedan to America until the late 1960s, the nameplates consisted mainly of one German, one Brit, and two, possibly three, Italians. Porsche. Jaguar. Ferrari. Lamborghini.
Alfa Romeo could also be counted, and its Spider roadster gained fame in the 1967 countercultural coming-of-age film The Graduate, from the director Mike Nichols. The MGB roadster from the British Motor Corporation was also a somewhat familiar sight. But the roadsters were for bohemian rakes and sophisticated college kids. The real sports cars were creatures of the racetrack.
And the men who ran America’s auto industry knew it. These marques were different from what was common on both U.S. roads and U.S. racetracks. Racing was controversial in the United States at this time, anyway. In the 1950s, concerned that racing was encouraging reckless behavior both on and off the track, the American Automobile Manufacturers Association called for a ban on carmakers’ participation in or support of motorsports. The Big Three went along with the ban, from 1957 until Ford broke the ban in 1962.
What intrigued people about the European sports cars was the usual mixture of features that woo straightforward, plainspoken Yanks to the charms of the Old World: sexiness, chiefly, but also a spirited attitude toward driving and an embrace of timeless beauty over the notion that cars are A-to-B machines. Sure, Detroit had lost its mind in the 1950s and created some of the most out-there, exuberant, overdone cars of all time, orgies of thrusting hood ornaments, dramatic tail fins, thick whitewall tires, wild colors, and oceans of chrome. But by the 1960s that excess had all been dialed back. Ford’s “pony car,” the Mustang, would be introduced in 1964, following the Chevrolet Corvette roadster by a decade, and the brutalist muscle cars that would define the brawny side of Detroit would arrive over the next ten years.
The really stylish stuff, either dripping with sex in the case of the Italians, oozing panache like the Jags and Aston Martins, or proposing the perfect driving experience, à la Porsche, was a European thing. And the racing added a dash of danger to the seductiveness.
When Henry Ford II—nicknamed “the Deuce”—thought about what he really wanted in life, he wanted some of that sex and style. The son of Edsel Ford and grandson of Henry Ford, the Deuce was a man of considerable appetites and ambitions. He had a taste for European cars and European women, and he wasn’t reluctant to act on his urges. In 1965, he left his wife and married his Italian mistress, Maria Cristina Vettore Austin, who would appear on the cover of Life magazine in a Detroit Lions T-shirt.
But Cristina ultimately didn’t represent his boldest Italian conquest. Henry Ford II wanted to buy Ferrari. And he almost did.
Henry Ford II was actually the perfect American to make a play for the Italian carmaker. The Deuce was one of those mid-century scions of industry who combined worldly self-confidence with a well-tailored masculine swagger and a passion for business. He was no entitled layabout, happy to live off his inherited lucre while savoring the 1950s’ and 1960s’ never-ending, sun-chasing party for wealthy elites. There could have been frequent touchdowns in New York, London, Rome, Paris, Hollywood, the south of France, Monaco, the Italian islands, and before the Cuban Revolution, Havana. He had the wherewithal and could be indulged—being a Ford has never automatically meant following in the founder’s giant footsteps. Working in the family business is optional and at times has been actively discouraged, given that certain heirs have lacked the competence to manage a global manufacturing enterprise.
Henry Ford II’s grand and often grandiose life has been thoroughly examined, investigated, and recounted, but the short version is that in 1945, when he wasn’t yet thirty years old, he took charge of Ford on his father’s death and dragged the original American car company, an icon of the second industrial revolution, into the modern business world. He did so by making two critical decisions.
First, he brought in a group of number crunchers from the Army Air Forces. They hadn’t beaten the Nazis and the Japanese militarists all by themselves. But they had proved that victory in war, and later success in business, could be ruthlessly quantified and statistically scrutinized. The Whiz Kids, as they were called, took Ford out of its play-by-feel, postwar mode and into the new age of management by hard data. One of them, Robert McNamara, would become president of Ford in 1960 and later John F. Kennedy’s and then Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense, presiding over the early phases of the Vietnam War.
Second, Henry Ford II believed that employee Lee Iacocca was onto something with a new car called the Mustang. Henry II had put Iacocca in charge of the Ford division of the Ford Motor Company (like General Motors, Ford was a holding company, encompassing Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, and Ford Credit, which had been set up in the late 1950s, despite Henry Ford’s distaste for lending at interest).
The company has on balance enjoyed more successful runs with other vehicles, namely the F-Series pickup truck. But Iacocca’s Mustang (in truth, he wasn’t the only Ford executive or employee to champion the first ’Stang, but he was an instrumental mover and shaker) is Ford’s most iconic car except for the Model T, which naturally is no longer in production. The only other Ford vehicle ever built that has inspired such raptures of loyalty and enthusiasm as the Mustang is, of course, the Le Mans–winning GT40.
But we’ll get to that car shortly, and for what it’s worth, almost no GT40s made it to the road, while Mustangs have hit the highways in the United States by the millions—and more recently have become the most popular sports cars in Europe.
Iacocca’s insight was simplicity itself: young people want a young people’s car. When he took Henry II up on his offer to run the Ford division, he saw a wave of people under thirty hitting the U.S. car market. They weren’t going to buy a hulking sedan—they were going to want something fun.
This was what Henry II saw in Iacocca—not a gasoline-in-the-veins gearhead, not a number cruncher like McNamara, but a salesman. If Iacocca thought there was a market that was about to be underserved by Ford’s products, then Iacocca was probably right. The guy was born to sell. Let him create something that he could sell, and you were home free.
It’s all more complicated than the Whiz Kids and the Mustang, but those two developments nonetheless nicely capture what made Henry Ford II a great leader. There was a third idea, however. It wasn’t critical to Ford’s business, but it would set the company on a trajectory that would conclude in France in June 1966.
Enzo Ferrari was a dirt-poor working-class Italian kid who fell in love with racing the first time he saw a Fiat running flat out. He became a driver for Fiat, and later for Alfa Romeo, and in 1929 he founded the Scuderia Ferrari, which was intended to build race cars for Alfa. After the war, the Scuderia (which means “stable” in Italian) would build race cars for itself, and its first big win would come at the 24 Hours of Le Mans of 1949. One of the winning car’s drivers was Luigi Chinetti, an exceptionally important individual in Ferrari’s history; it was he who would start selling Ferraris in America and open a vast U.S. auto market to the road-car arm of the Scuderia that Enzo would establish in 1947, entirely to fund his racing efforts.
The company, even today, begins and ends with the Scuderia, even though its road cars have been with us for decades and have graced, in poster form, the bedroom walls of countless young men. Maybe Ferrari fans don’t yearn to race so much as they yearn for everything the brand represents: speed, sexy red cars, and lots of money. Ferraris pop up everywhere in the culture: on television in Magnum, P.I. (a 308 GTB) and Miami Vice (a Daytona) and in movies such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (a replica 1961 250 GT California Spyder) and National Lampoon’s Vacation (another 308, possibly outclassed by its driver, the leggy blond model and actress Christie Brinkley).
What really matters to the company, however, is racing, and for much of Ferrari’s history, racing meant Le Mans and Formula One. It was the perfect one-two punch. Formula One was the acid test of speed, performance, technology, and driver skill, and Ferrari has never missed a season since the modern form of the racing series was developed in the postwar period. Le Mans wins would prove reliability and validate various types of technology developed for the prolonged speeds and changing conditions of the Circuit de la Sarthe, while the race itself would stress long-term strategy and teamwork.
Racing is expensive, and unlike Ford and General Motors in the United States, carmakers that were rediscovering factory-supported racing with stock cars in the 1960s, Ferrari wasn’t selling millions of cars and trucks a year to a gigantic and affluent population. Ferrari was barely selling any road cars at all, relative to European giants like Fiat. This was all sustainable in the small-scale prewar economy, but after the war it was a road to ruin for Ferrari. Enzo couldn’t make the business work on his own, so he started looking for help—which really meant that he wanted to locate a partner who would fund the Scuderia and bask in the glory of that undertaking, while aiding in the manufacture, distribution, and marketing of road cars.
This was where Ford came in. The setup seemed perfect. The Deuce owned a Ferrari, a gift from Enzo himself. He was perhaps unique among Americans in understanding exactly what Ferrari was all about, recognizing that Enzo’s Achilles’ heel as an automaker was that he didn’t really want to be an automaker. Race cars were something special. Road cars were a means to an end for Enzo Ferrari, and that end was more race cars.
There was a whiff of arrogance about that, but if anyone in the world was entitled to a little hubris, it was Enzo Ferrari, then in his sixties and not exactly equipped to be the master of Ferrari’s next necessary stage, which was to become a global car brand trading on its spectacular successes on the track. His son Alfredo, called Dino, had died in 1956; this was the greatest tragedy and setback of Enzo’s life, robbing him of an heir. He had another son, by his mistress, but putting him in charge of the company was an impossibility. (Enzo would finally claim Piero as his son in the late 1970s, and today Piero is the only living Ferrari, holding a 10 percent stake in the company. He became incredibly wealthy when Ferrari separated from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles in 2015 with an initial public offering that valued the carmaker at nearly $10 billion.)
Something about Ford as a great family business appealed to Enzo. Yes, the American colossus had held a public stock offering in the mid-1950s, but the Ford family still ran the show. Enzo Ferrari believed that Henry Ford II would understand what he required, which was to become for all practical purposes the European racing arm of Ford, using victories on the track to sell more and more sexy road cars, especially in the United States. Chinetti was confident that the impeccable Italian style of the Prancing Horse could captivate anyone with the means to spend lavishly. The war had ended—Americans weren’t provincial anymore. Many of them had seen Europe during the war and were traveling there. They ruled the world and were getting richer and richer every year. It was a land of new millionaires, and they needed to display their wealth. What better way to do that than with an exciting car that could trace its lineage to epic wins on the track? Ferrari even called one of his cars “California,” in a nod to all the Golden State represented: boundless optimism, beautiful weather, Hollywood, gorgeous women, handsome men, pioneers, sunshine, beaches, and roads that went on forever, all leading to sunsets over the Pacific.
In his 2009 book Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans, A. J. Baime hints that Enzo may have had an ulterior motive in courting Ford. Ferrari had been involved relatively recently in a crash that had cost the lives of both a driver and fourteen spectators at the Formula One grand prix race at Monza, near Milan, in northern Italy’s industrial region, and Enzo had abruptly become a national pariah, a menace. He had to do something to change the climate in which he lived, given that he was otherwise widely regarded as a national treasure, and Ferrari the automaker was a potent symbol of Italy’s recovery from the war and fascism. (There has never been a less fascist machine than a sinuous red Ferrari, brimming with decadent Western values and a disdain for Aryan Übermensch propaganda.)
Is it possible that Enzo was playing Henry for short-term reputational rehabilitation?
I don’t think so. Enzo could see that he needed a sugar daddy, and he did get one later, when Fiat took effective control of Ferrari in the 1970s. That was obviously more nationalistically palatable, as Fiat was the symbol of the Italian postwar economic comeback, overseen by a patrician family headed by the peerless Gianni Agnelli—the only man in Italy who had anything on Enzo Ferrari. As the deal making progressed with Ford and rapidly went off the rails, it became abundantly clear that all Enzo wanted, down deep, was to keep the Scuderia going. The rest was noise, vulgar commerce. Enzo wasn’t really a natural businessman—he was a driver, a merchant of speed, who built the machines that most gloriously accessed that twentieth-century creation.
It’s not really clear whether the Deuce overplayed his hand or if Ford simply over-bureaucratized the process of buying Enzo’s life work, without properly grasping why it was his lifework. But when it came time to sign the papers for a proposed $10 million acquisition of Ferrari by Ford, Enzo quickly spotted that Ford might—might—have something to say about racing investment. And that was that.
Here’s what Enzo wanted: 100 percent control of the Scuderia. Ford would buy the road-car operation and expand it. And the money would flow back to Enzo, and he would use it to build race cars, co-branded as Ferraris and Fords, that would win the 24 Hours of Le Mans and Formula One races. Or maybe just Le Mans, or whatever, ultimately, Enzo thought was right. He would have no master when it came to racing.
It was an astonishingly naive approach to the deal. But Enzo thought Ford understood. They were a company, and a family, that had built the Model T and sold it to everybody. Ferrari was a company, and a family, that built race cars and didn’t care about selling cars to anybody.
The thing is, in defining Ford as just a brute manufacturer of transportation for the masses, Enzo overlooked a small but relevant detail. The first Henry Ford, the founder of the company, had been a race-car driver. Like Enzo, he understood the marketing value of speed—of one car being able to beat another.
“He used his winnings from a race to start Ford,” Mark Fields reminded me in Le Mans.
In October 1901, Henry Ford took part in the only race he would ever win. He defeated Alexander Winton in a ten-lap contest (shortened from twenty-five) in Grosse Pointe, near Detroit, with $1,000 on the line. In a race that would predate the 24 Hours of Le Mans by decades, Ford won with reliability. Winton’s car exceeded Ford’s by forty horsepower, but Ford’s own design made it to the finish, while Winton’s faltered.
The thirty-eight-year-old Henry Ford was coming off a failed automotive venture and needed investors to start the new Ford Motor Company. His win against Winton convinced them that Ford would make good on his promises. By 1903, the Ford Motor Company had been established.
It all started with a race. Not much of race, to be sure, nothing that would have impressed Enzo all that much. But still, a race. Who knows whether the Deuce was channeling that victory, sixty-some years after the fact, when he got word that Enzo had rebuffed his offer. But something in Henry Ford II rose up at the thought that Ferrari had no respect for Ford’s racing potential, something deep-seated and based in its own way on racing pride.
Enzo didn’t need Ford? Then Henry Ford II would show Enzo he wasn’t as good at racing as he thought. “All right, we’ll beat his ass”—that was what Henry II reportedly said when the deal went bust. The Ford GT40 was about to be born. And the place Henry Ford II would choose to beat Enzo Ferrari was the site of Ferrari’s greatest success: Le Mans.