Ferrari

Early history

Enzo Ferrari, formerly a salesman and racing driver for Alfa Romeo, founded Scuderia Ferrari, a racing team, in 1929. Originally intended to service gentleman drivers and other amateur racers, Alfa Romeo's withdrawal from racing in 1933, combined with Enzo's connections within the company, turned Scuderia Ferrari into its unofficial representative on the track. Alfa Romeo supplied racing cars to Ferrari, who eventually amassed some of the best drivers of the 1930s and won many races before the team's liquidation in 1937.

Late in 1937, Scuderia Ferrari was liquidated and absorbed into Alfa Romeo, but Enzo's disagreements with upper management caused him to leave in 1939. He used his settlement to found his own company, where he intended to produce his own cars. He called the company "Auto Avio Costruzioni", and headquartered it in the facilities of the old Scuderia Ferrari; due to a noncompete agreement with Alfa Romeo, the company could not use the Ferrari name for another four years. The company produced a single car, the Auto Avio Costruzioni 815, which participated in only one race before the outbreak of World War II. During the war, Enzo's company produced aircraft engines and machine tools for the Italian military; the contracts for these goods were lucrative, and provided the new company with a great deal of capital. In 1943, under threat of Allied bombing raids, the company's factory was moved to Maranello. Though the new facility was nonetheless bombed twice, Ferrari remains in Maranello to this day.

Under Enzo Ferrari

In 1945, Ferrari adopted its current name. Work started promptly on a new V12 engine that would power the 125 S, which was the marque's first car, and many subsequent Ferraris. The company saw success in motorsport almost as soon as it began racing: the 125 S won many races in 1947, and several early victories, including the 1949 24 Hours of Le Mans and 1951 Carrera Panamericana, helped build Ferrari's reputation as a high-quality automaker. Ferrari won several more races in the coming years, and early in the 1950s its road cars were already a favourite of the international elite. Ferrari produced many families of interrelated cars, including the America, Monza, and 250 series, and the company's first series-produced car was the 250 GT Coupé, beginning in 1958.

In 1960, Ferrari was reorganized as a public company. It soon began searching for a business partner to handle its manufacturing operations: it first approached Ford in 1963, though negotiations fell through; later talks with Fiat, who bought 50% of Ferrari's shares in 1969, were more successful. In the second half of the decade, Ferrari also produced two cars that upended its more traditional models: the 1967 Dino 206 GT, which was its first mass-produced mid-engined road car, and the 1968 365 GTB/4, which possessed streamlined styling that modernised Ferrari's design language. The Dino in particular was a decisive movement away from the company's conservative engineering approach, where every road-going Ferrari featured a V12 engine placed in the front of the car, and it presaged Ferrari's full embrace of mid-engine architecture, as well as V6 and V8 engines, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Contemporary

Enzo Ferrari died in 1988, an event that saw Fiat expand its stake to 90%. The last car that he personally approved—the F40—expanded on the flagship supercar approach first tried by the 288 GTO four years earlier. Enzo was succeeded in 1991 by Luca di Montezemolo, under whose 23-year-long chairmanship the company greatly expanded. Between 1991 and 2014, he increased the profitability of Ferrari's road cars nearly tenfold, both by increasing the range of cars offered and through limiting the total number produced. Montezemolo's chairmanship also saw an expansion in licensing deals, a drastic improvement in Ferrari's Formula One performance (not least through the hiring of Michael Schumacher and Jean Todt), and the production of three more flagship cars: the F50, the Enzo, and the LaFerrari. In addition to his leadership of Ferrari, Montezemolo was also the chairman of Fiat proper between 2004 and 2010.

After Montezemolo resigned, he was replaced in quick succession by many new chairmen and CEOs. He was succeeded first by Sergio Marchionne, who would oversee Ferrari's initial public offering and subsequent spin-off from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, and then by Louis Camilleri as CEO and John Elkann as chairman. Beginning in 2021, Camilleri was replaced as CEO by Benedetto Vigna, who has announced plans to develop Ferrari's first fully electric model. During this period, Ferrari has expanded its production, owing to a global increase in wealth, while becoming more selective with its licensing deals.