Founders - #98 Enzo Ferrari (the making of an automobile empire)

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

What I learned from reading Enzo Ferrari: Power, Politics, and the Making of an Automobile Empire by Luca Dal Monte.----Come see a live show with me and Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like The Best on October 19th in New York City. Get your tickets here! ----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can listen to Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes and every bonus episode. ---[0:01] Ferrari was animated by an extraordinary passion that led him to build a product with no equal[3:52] Lee Iacocca on why Enzo Ferrari will go as the greatest car manufacturer in history: "Ferrari spent every dollar chasing perfection." [8:50] Business lessons from his father  [11:47] Enzo Ferrari was not interested in school. He wanted to start working immediately. [16:36] The deaths of his father and brother [18:20] No job. No money. No connections. A young man desperate to succeed in life. [23:06] He learned something that he would never forget for the rest of his life: Not even the best driver had any chance of victory if he was not at the wheel of the best car. [24:20] Starting his first business which ends in bankruptcy.[28:31] Enzo learned from those who already accomplished what he was trying to do. [31:10] He does the best possible job at whatever task he is given. Even if he doesn't want to do it. Enzo focuses on being useful. [33:35] A young Enzo Ferrari is plagued with doubts and close to a nervous breakdown. [38:28] The large leave gaps for the small: The start of Scuderia Ferrari. [49:38] Enzo Ferrari at 33 years old. [51:30] For Enzo Ferrari it was always day 1.[52:33] Alfa Romeo pulls the plug/the end of Scuderia Ferrari, the birth of Ferrari.----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Ferrari was a genius of entrepreneurship, a visionary who possessed the ability to realize his dreams. When asked how he wanted to be remembered, he famously replied, as someone who dreamt of becoming Ferrari. Ferrari was animated by an extraordinary passion that led him to build a product with no equal. He started in a tiny village in northern Italy, which thanks to him became the epicenter of the most exclusive automotive production in the world. Ferrari had two fundamental talents. First, he was, by his own admission, a shaker of ideas in men.

Gifted with a charisma that effortlessly captured anyone who crossed his path, Ferrari could stimulate the energy and creativity of his colleagues like no one else. He was very demanding, especially when things were going well. We all had to be careful not to sit on our laurels. He was absolutely dedicated and could be ruthless. Ferrari's second talent? He was an absolute marketing genius. I remember one visit from a very important and wealthy American client. The factory parking lots were filled with unsold cars, which we tried to hide from public view. The American said, I would like to buy a Ferrari. Ferrari replied, yes, of course, but we have so many requests. I'll do what I can, but I'm afraid that you'll have to wait several months before you can buy one. That was because a Ferrari must be desired.

It cannot and must not be perceived as something that is immediately available. Otherwise, that dream is gone. In order to maintain the exclusivity of the brand, production has always been lower than the requests of the market. Ferrari the man was an intentional prisoner of his own myth. He had habits that he rigorously respected. He never boarded a plane. He left Marinara only on rare occasions. Those who wanted to meet him had to come to his office, no matter where they came from. He wore dark glasses in order to observe and judge everybody without giving them the opportunity to look him in the eye.

I have many personal memories of Enzo Ferrari, and the years that I spent with him. I like to go back in time to September 7th, 1975, the day of the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. It was an unforgettable Sunday. We won the race and brought back to Maranello after 11 years the world title with one race to go. I can still see the roaring crowds and the flags and feel the embrace of the whole team. But above all, I remember my phone call with Ferrari. From the sound of his voice, I realized that he had been crying. This had never happened before. Thank you, he said to me. It was a very emotional moment that will forever be in my heart. In this painstakingly researched, entirely accurate account, Luca Del Monte has vividly captured in these pages the Enzo that I knew and loved.

That was written by Luca Di Monsimalo. It's an excerpt from the foreword of the book that I read this week and the one I want to talk to you about today, which is Enzo Ferrari, Power, Politics, and the Making of an Automotive Empire. So this is the longest biography that I've read for the podcast and there's a lot to get to, so I want to get right into it. Before I go right to the book though, I want to talk about the scene that's in the new Ford versus Ferrari movie. And it's Lee Iacocca talking to Henry Ford II and a bunch of other executives about why he thinks they should make an offer for Ferrari. And when he brings up Ferrari, the other Ford executives that are extremely unlikable in the movie, if you go see it, you'll see why. They're kind of dismissive.

They're like, why? Like, we build more cars in an afternoon than Ferrari does all year. And he says, Enzo Ferrari will go down in history as the greatest car manufacturer of all time and they're like what why like it's not because he builds the most cars it's because he spent every lira which is the currency of Italy at the time which could be it's because he spent every lira chasing perfection he was completely obsessed if you go see the movie, you'll see the difference. The people in the movie that come across extremely likable,

it's interesting because when I read that book last week, Go Like Hell, I had the same thoughts. Carroll Shelby, misfit. Like, if you like this podcast, you're going to love Carroll Shelby. If you like this podcast, you're going to love Enzo Ferrari. You're going to love Ken Miles, the driver. Those are the people that come off at least like, even if you don't consider Enzo Ferrari likable, you respect his dedication to his craft, right? And then in the movie, just like in the book, Henry Ford II comes off less likable

and the organization, the bureaucracy of the Ford organization in the 1960s, they're almost like the villain in the movie, if you will. And I kind of picked up that same thing when I was reading. Now, the second thing he said that I think is important to understand Enzo Ferrari, it's his personality. Because not only is he unbelievably dedicated, it just said in the forward, the person that worked for him says he built a product that had no equal. That's exactly what he set out to do. In that case, he reminds me a lot there's a lot of his personality and the way he talks about other people and other products um they remind me steve jobs you're going to see that here because that's all he cared about and if you were dedicated to what you're doing like he respected shelby even if they didn't

like each other he respected the driver um ken miles he gives him like a tip of the hat at the end of the movie because he saw the same the same passion that he has to what he's doing all day they had and he does anybody that doesn't possess that passion he doesn't respect so he talks about this is after the uh leo iacocca travels italy tries to do a deal with ferrari it falls through i'm not going to repeat much of that because i talked about it last week but he he talks about this is an inside interest personality so hen Henry Ford asks Lea Coco, what did Enzo say? And Lea Coco's trying to like, in the movie, he's like, oh, you know, kind of dancing around. And he says, just tell me what he says. This is Enzo talking to Lee.

He goes, tell Henry Ford, tell him, tell him, Henry Ford II meaning, tell him that he's not Henry Ford. That he's Henry Ford II. All right. So he's like, I had respect for Henry Ford. I had a lot of respect for what he did. I don't respect Henry Ford II, right? So he's like, I had respect for Henry Ford. I had a lot of respect for what he did. I don't respect Henry Ford II. And then he says, he goes, what else did he say? Tell him that Ford makes ugly little cars and ugly little factories. Tell him that he's fat and he's pig-headed. So he has this like unbelievably, I think the word luca used in the intro in the forward there was ruthless

100 ferrari was like and this is why i think he's so complicated everybody else thinks he's so complicated and i did too for a little bit and now maybe i'm rethinking that position or i think i have completely rethought the position yes he's ruthless he's ruthless if you get in the way of his one goal which is to build the best car in the world, not only did he want to make his cars the fastest, he wanted to make them beautiful. That's why everything was handmade. And that's why he was fine. He took a completely different route than Ford did. He says, I don't want your big, ugly, automated factories and have success because I can build 8,000 cars in a weekend or whatever it is.

I will build 300 cars a year or 700 cars a year or 1,500 cars a year. I think that's like a good place to start to understand. Like he's complex, and I know I'm repeating myself, but he's complex, but he's really not. He's hard for other people to understand that are not obsessives. And the one thing about this podcast is every single person that we study on this podcast is an obsessive. So if you take Enzo into account, like all the other great entrepreneurs that we study, then he kind of makes sense because he's cut from the same cloth.

But I think when you interact with other normal people, whatever you want to call them, they have a hard time understanding that. Okay, so let me jump into the book because I have a lot of highlights. And this thing is massive. It's like it's heavy. It's hard for me to even hold up right now. So I want to go to his early life. He learned a lot. His father dies when Enzo's only 18 years old. And so they didn't have a long time together, but his father's name's Alfredo. He had an unbelievably impact onto not only how Enzo lived his life, but how he ran his business. Alfredo was also an entrepreneur. He had his own workshop. He worked on cars and everything. So he says, Alfredo turned his hand as needed to all

the different tasks required by his company, manager, designer, accountant, typist. Enzo would never forget this lesson from his father. Young Enzo learned the importance of the order of things and of diligently keeping a record of everything that went on. So this is something that Enzo does his entire life. He has a notebook that he carries around and writes down every single thing that happens to him. And he does this throughout his whole life. Back to the book. For the boy, the father was a living example of a devotion to duty. Okay, check. Enzo definitely has a devotion to duty. A strong individualist. They're using the word individualist when you think about how enzo ran his his company in his life he's a dictator uh no more than his approach to business alfredo

preferred working alone with complete autonomy to a joint partnership that shared risk as well as reward so he tells his son all the time like don't have business partners his philosophy i'm running over my own point here. His philosophy was emphasized in the business credo that he taught his son as a child and which Enzo would never forget. To be successful, one should not have to answer to any partner and should be independent. So when the time came to create his own company, Enzo would remember what his father had taught him. So this is a little bit more about the home environment. They were extremely passionate, argumentative family, and that influenced Enzo's life. So they often argued, and talking about his parents, and ferociously.

They argued about almost anything, and theatrically so. By his own admission, his parents' continuous disputes and foul language had an impact on Enzo's own nature and the person he became. So the book is full with antidotes about people waiting to meet with Ferrari in the Heerman's office, talking to somebody, yelling. It's a contention. There was no harmony in his company. And I think that was by design. Not only did he want individuals within his company to compete with each other, which is his own unique take on management, he had no desire for harmony. He thought like the best environments were one where like you had to argue to see who was correct.

You had to fight. You had to make people compete. It was, for me, it'd be an unpleasant place to work unless I was the one running the company. But, you know, his belief is that he had a small group of completely dedicated, passionate, to use the term that Steve Jobs used, like A-plus players. He would only be able to get them to reach their potential in this war-like environment. Back to his early life, and for Enzo, it was very apparent at a very young age. He hated school. He did terrible at it. No one would consider him to be an educated person by any means but that didn't matter because he he had a he had an insane focus on work he said enzo would frankly admit to having experienced a true aversion to study

meaning he would study anything that like when it came to cars and cars racing he knew everything because he was completely uh engrossed in that one one craft or that one trade or that one journey, whatever you want to call it. But anything outside of that, like if you're going to put a young Enzo and have him learn stuff from a teacher that he doesn't care about, it's not going to happen. So we see that here. He says, Enzo would frankly admit to having experienced a true aversion to study. When his father exhorted him to study so that he might one day become an engineer, Enzo replied that he'd rather quit school and start working immediately, which is exactly what he does, by the way. So I want to talk about you're not born with a passion for racing cars, right?

No one is. You have to find your passion. And Jeff Bezos sometimes says that passions find us. In Enzo's case, that might be true. So this is how Enzo finds his life passion. It's in 1908. He's just 10 years old, and his father takes him to an automobile race, the first one ever. All right, so it says when Enzo was 10 years old, his father took him to see his first automobile race. It produced an

indelible spark in his heart. His early excitement unquestionably had the effect of kindling an internal fire in him, a passion in which Enzo would dedicate the rest of his life. It was there that young Enzo began to dream of one day becoming Ferrari. So you got to bear with me here. I'm going to go through, I have some other highlights that come, you know, 800 pages later than when we were in the book. And it's going to illustrate what I think is the main point that I would learn from this book. It doesn't matter if you're building cars, if you're building an app, if you're building a house. Whatever it is that you do during the day, if you approach it with the obsessiveness of Enzo Ferrari,

you will be successful at whatever you do. Now, it's also very hard to do because his schedule was extreme. Seven days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day, holidays included. That's it. Family time? No. Even though he had a good relationship with his son who winds up dying when his son dies from muscular dystrophy when he's 24. It's actually the most painful thing that ever happens to Enzo, obviously. It's something that he wakes up every day for the rest of his life and every morning he goes and visits his son's grave his son's tomb other than that though enzo had no loves so let me give you some just some quotes we kind of we see this throughout the book this is

him as an old man he says the secret of this total faithfulness think about the word he's using there the secret of this total faithfulness which i believe is difficult to find in other types of relationships. He's talking about his work here. Which I believe is difficult to find in other types of relationships, he confessed, springs from the possibility to do year after year new experiments to find new solutions to build new automobiles. Again, that word total, whole, entire, full, unquestioned. Here's another one for you, another example of it. He confessed that he believed he possessed just one quality, the stubborn determination to capture the trust of those who work with me. I still have only two

wishes, to be able to work until the last day of my life and to see all Italians think of themselves as the sons of the same mother. Italy was extremely nationalistic and proud of being Italian. And then writing in his autobiography about his wedding. Now, this is a great illustration. This is a reflection. He's still married at the time he's writing this. I should not have married because a man dominated by a passion such as mine can hardly divide himself in half and be a good husband.

If I had listened to my wife, I would have been a clerk in a bus company. And I think it's a question of whether he had a passion or the passion had him. And I think it might have been the latter. All right, so let me go back to his early life. This is when he leaves school, he fails out of school, starts to work, and then he has one of the largest tragedies of life. It says, after failing the third class of the Technical Institute, his studies were over. Enzo did not return to school, and thanks to experience he gained in his father's workshop, he found a job at the machine shop of the fire department. A couple of nights before the end of the year, Alfredo Ferrari had gone to bed with a high fever. It was normal bronchitis,

which quickly turned into pneumonia. Within three days, he was dead. He was not quite 57 years old. With the death of his father, Enzo lost a precise reference point. A little over a month before his 18th birthday, Enzo was not prepared for his father's death. The sudden loss of his father was the first great sorrow in Enzo Ferrari's life, the first of many, and perhaps the one that began to shape the man he would become. The memories, not only of his father, but also of sudden death, would never abandon him. Before the year ended, however, Enzo would be devastated by a second tragedy. His brother, Dino, died too.

So his son's named after him. After a year of war, he had contracted pneumonia, which due to the precarious conditions in which soldiers lived, had quickly killed him. He was just 20 years old. In less than 12 months, Enzo's life had been turned upside down. Father and brother were gone. The sudden death of his father had put at risk the welfare of the Ferrari family, who certainly could not live off the small salary that Enzo was earning. So now I want to tell you about one of the most important moments in his life, okay? His brother's

dead, his dad's dead. They have little money. Eventually, Alfredo's workshop gets closed down completely. And so he has to travel to the larger city of Turin. And he's trying to get a job. He's obsessed with cars still. So he wants to work for the most successful car manufacturer at the time, which is Fiat. And you have to remember this part of his life for the end of the podcast. It's one of the most important things that ever happens to Enzo. He tries to get a job. He has a job interview. He says, Enzo had sincerely, though somewhat naively, hoped to find a job at Fiat, but their negative answer left him distraught. He had no money,

no job, and no intention of going back to Modena. That's the little city he lived in. He was overwhelmed. He brushed the snow off of a park bench, sat down, and wept. It was a rare moment of true despair in his life. He was determined not to give up. This is the lowest point of Enzo Ferrari's life, of his young life, outside of obviously the death of his son. His family is dead. He has no job. He has no money. He has no connections. And yet this, where we are in the story, this young, desperate person will not give

up. It's from this moment in his life that he starts to the the climb to build ferrari so he winds up getting a job he's got an acquaintance of his father in turin it's not a fiat it's at this tiny little repair shop and this guy named giovanni gives him the job so he says after the disappointments and hardships of the first two months in turin the modest salary giovanni gave him provided Enzo with enough money to eat. So it is from this low point in his life that he starts the gradual step, the gradual climb to eventually build Ferrari. So he starts out broke, alone, poor, on a snowy park bench. And the first step up, okay, I'll just work at this workshop. And what he is, just like every single other person that I've ever covered, he's extremely resourceful.

He just takes one opportunity, does the best of his ability at that opportunity, then waits until that eventually, inevitably, I would say, opens up another opportunity. Then he takes that next step. Then he repeats this process over and over again, and he does this over an extremely long period of time. It's important to note, Ferrari, the way we think about it, the car manufacturer, the one that's owned by Enzo Ferrari, that is 40 years in the making.

He does not found Ferrari until he's around, I would say, 42, somewhere in there, maybe 45 years old, maybe even 48 years old. I can't remember the exact. But he's in his 40s by the time he founds the company that is why he's revered and most and and uh and uh most well known today but the important part of the reason i'm telling you all this is because where i'm focusing on is the steps he had to go through before he gets to that position because every opportunity every experience that that he went through was preparing him for the day to to be able to found the company

ferrari so his first love is racing now he realizes to that the key to be able to found the company Ferrari. So his first love is racing. Now he realizes that the key to winning races is to building the best cars. And so that is the byproduct that leads us to Ferrari the car company. But he doesn't start out with the best cars. In fact, he starts racing with whatever he can get. So this is his financial situation when he starts racing. He had to pledge a month's worth of salary as collateral to get a car. And so where's Ferrari starting out this climb to build the Ferrari company or the journey that eventually leads there? All of his possessions amounted to no more than 450 lira. So it's not a lot of money at all. So this is Enzo showing his resourcefulness

in acquiring a better race car. So what do you do? The same thing he's doing in racing. This is what he does in life. Okay, so I'll just take whatever opportunity I can get. Okay, this is a crappy race car. I'm going to race. I'm going to do the best job driving this car as I can. And then when I have limited success with that, I'm going to try to trade up into a slightly better car.

And then I'm going to do the same thing over. Okay, now I've gotten to a different position. Now I'm going to try to get a slightly better car. So this is him showing his resourcefulness in acquiring a better race car. It says, it was indeed a powerful car, but it was also seven years old, having been produced in 1913. Enzo knew that soon car manufacturers would put out new racing cars and all the pre-war units would become obsolete. Enzo used his best charm. After some negotiations, based on the

assumption that soon this car would no longer find any potential buyers, he was a master salesperson, he persuaded the car manufacturer to essentially swap cars with him. And so all this time, Enzo's racing, let's call them like small regional companies. I don't think you'd ever recognize the brand name. There's a lot of brand names that you'll recognize in this book at this time. Because remember, Enzo said that the small area where he came from, they had a special psychosis, psychosis, I think is the word he used, for car racing. And so he's learning that he eventually has to work himself into, if he wants to be a race car driver, which is what he wants to do, because now he's around 20 years old, right? He realizes that he's got to expose himself to

opportunities to get the best cars in the world. And this is how he comes to that. He has a race. He does well, but he winds up losing. He said he also learned something that he would never forget for the rest of his life. Not even the best driver had any chance of victory if he was not at the wheel of the best car. And it didn't take him long to realize that the best cars available were being produced in Milan by Alfa Romeo. So that's a brand that's still around. Maserati's around at this time. Ferrari, of course. So now he's going to work himself into the position to go to Milan and to try to race

Alfa Romeo. Now, there's two things happening in this paragraph that I thought about, though. This idea that he realized, oh, wow, like, if I don't have the best car, I can't win races. I think that's why he goes on in his life like that influenced him later in his life to make the best possible car and you see this too because when the his inevitably ferrari becomes the most successful racing team in history okay and when he's winning all these races like he was very not he's not rude to the drivers but if he was obviously an obsessive so if if the race was won is because the car won the race if the race was lost it was the driver's fault so this gives you kind of an insight into you know who we're dealing with here so now i want to get

going to a little bit about his personality and i want to talk about his first business his first entrepreneurial activity which a lot of people don't even know ever happened. This reminded me, when I was reading this part, this reminded me of Walt Disney because everybody knows the company Walt Disney eventually built. Everybody knows the company that Enzo Ferrari eventually built. What they don't know is that by the time Walt Disney was 21, 22, somewhere or another, his first company in, I think it was St. Louis, Missouri, went bankrupt. And then he moves out to California and does his second act. And that's the company we all know and love today. This is exactly what happens to Enzo Ferrari. His first company goes bankrupt. And that failure was so embarrassing to him, to Enzo, that it's something that he had a fear for the rest of

his life. And he worked so hard to avoid. He winds up successfully avoiding this fate. So let me go into his personality, and I'll tell you about that first business that he starts. The key factors were Enzo's perseverance, a stubborn faith in himself. How many times is this book going to use the word stubborn? If I had to guess, it probably describes Enzo describing his stubborn behavior, I don't know, 50-plus times. A stubborn faith in himself and an insatiable thirst for success not simply in motor racing but in life these were all qualities that would never abandon enzo eventually shaping him into the automotive giant he became enzo opened uh okay so this is gonna be hard for me to pronounce let's call it amelia because that's the first word is something else carazera something like

that so let's call it amelia enzo opened Amelia, his first entrepreneur activity. On the one hand, Amelia was the most obvious of things, a CMN showroom. So this is one of the small regional car manufacturers I was telling you about. A CMN showroom. But on the other hand, and this was Enzo's grand plan, it was an independent coach builder, which is like the, think of that as like, it's almost at this time in history, putting together a car was almost like putting together a computer early in the days where like they might sell you a piece and you have to put them together. So maybe they give you the board and you have to figure out the monitor or whatever the case is. Like he wasn't manufacturing engines yet. He was manufacturing the, like the out, the exterior of the car. All right, so it continues.

It says, for in addition to selling CMN models and repairing and repainting cars of any brand, he planned to build bodies for those customers who bought chassis, radiator, hood, and dashboard from car manufacturers and then counted upon one of the many coach builders to complete the car. The idea was not revolutionary, of course, since it was precisely what this another company did in Milan. But it was a demonstration that Enzo was learning fast and eager to expand his horizons. His mother had been against this bold move. Like many people in those days, she still did not understand the enormous potential of the automobile. I think that's an important part too that no one can really teach you. And that's like, how do you, how are you able to see an opportunity

way before anybody else does? So now everybody sees how large the automobile industry. In the early 1900s, only a select few of people realized how massive this could actually get. Enzo Ferrari is one of them. We also saw this a few weeks ago with the podcast that he did on James J. Hill. You know, nobody really saw the opportunity that a well-run and well-built regional railroad would, like the economic opportunity that could provide. In that book, it talks about, like, you know, he'd mentioned it to friends hundreds of times over the years before he was able to actually do it. Like, he was completely convinced that this opportunity was just hiding in plain sight. Very similar to what Enzo's doing here. I'm going to skip ahead. This

is the, this business is going to fail. It's going to go bankrupt. They have to sell off the small possessions they have to pay off creditors. It says the humiliation of this colossal failure and the embarrassment he felt would serve as a fundamental lesson in the life of Enzo Ferrari. If it is true that negative experiences often teach us more than positive ones, this disaster of his first entrepreneurial experiment, which he never forgot, is the key to the future success of the man and the company he would one day create. And then his next step, what he does is his next step is really, really smart. And it's similar to what we're doing here. He gets a job at Alfa Romeo and this is why. Thus, he became better acquainted with the company's management. Enzo tried to glean as much knowledge as possible from these experienced men

in order to avoid a future repetition of his failed business. So he meets all these really successful older race car drivers, people working in the car industry. And really to understand Enzo was like, he's a learning machine. And he really was intentional about learning from those who had already accomplished what he wanted to do. And they had an influence on him. One of them is this guy named Antonio Oscari, but I'm just going to read this paragraph to you. I'll get there in a minute. Growing up at the school of a superstar like Antonio Oscari, or of artists like Ciovici and a strong champion like Campari, Ferrari now had been able to perfect his own style. And since he is tough and animated by a strong will to succeed, no goal is precluded to

him. Now, this period in his life is extremely important because he makes a lot of progress in a short amount of time. I'm going to read, we're skipping ahead a few years, but this one paragraph is going to give you an idea of what has occurred. He was about to turn 26 and could rightly be proud of what he had achieved in the short span of five years. He was about to turn 26 and could rightly be proud of what he had achieved in the short span of five years. He was one of the most prominent Italian sportsmen, one of Alpha Corsa's top racing drivers, the right-hand man of Alpha Romeo's commercial director, and the owner of a car dealership in his hometown. So he had to do all that in steps. The first thing, you have to get good at racing cars. And he got really good at racing cars.

Eventually gets promoted up to a team. It's called Alpha Courses. They race for Alfa Romeo. And then once you become one of the top racing drivers, which he certainly was at this point in his life, what was very common is because these races get so much publicity and press, is a lot of the drivers would then start, let's them like little franchises of their own, car dealers. Because like, oh, I know Enzo Ferrari. I saw him race at this, you know, race. Oh, I want to buy my car from him. And so he winds up having, I don't know, like two or three of these things spread in little towns throughout Italy, as did very common for

like other race drivers to do this as well. So in this course of five years, he's worked himself into a nice position. He's still not where he wants to be, but he does smart things along the way. Okay. And he's not in control. Remember, he becomes a dictator because he's obsessed with, he wants to control what he does with his time. He wants to be the one making decisions. He wants to make, like be the one building the cars. He wants the one selecting the drivers. He wants to do everything, right? He's not there yet, but to get there, eventually work himself in that position, he does something very smart. So let me just read the sentence and then I'll read the note, like my interpretation of what's happening in the book at this time. It says,

just when Enzo was beginning to digest a painful exclusion, Alfa Romeo's decision to not count him as one of its drivers for the Grand Prix program, this big opportunity came knocking on his door. The Alfa Romeo management knew what they were doing. Although Enzo had lately been more useful to them off the track, his racing talents was familiar to all. So that's what they were talking about. He becomes the right-hand man of one of the directors, Alfa Romeo. So what's happening here? Even when he's not called on to race, which is his real goal, right, at this time in his life, he does the best possible job at whatever the task is. So they ask him to be part of the pit crew. Okay, I'm going to do that.

I'm going to do the best damn job I can at the pit crew. They ask him to recruit engineers to the company, even though he doesn't own the company. He goes and does that. I'm going to be the best recruiter possible. You want me to attend an auto show? It's not even a race. It's like auto shows they have to this day where they manufacture show off their new models. You want to go there and maybe have me talk about the product and talk to potential customers? I'll go do that. In other words, the reason now he has

this opportunity is because he's always focusing on being useful. Now, I'm skipping ahead. This is very interesting because his main goal in life was to be the greatest racing driver, right? And then he's doing okay at it. He's a very respectable driver, has some success, but he realizes he can never be the best. And this is also the problem with competing and things. The reason I think entrepreneurship is so great as opposed to like sports or race cars or anything like that is because it's positive some. You can succeed. I can succeed. Tons of other businesses can all succeed at the same time. In racing or in athletics or any case, it's usually zero sum.

There's one winner and everybody else has to wait until next year. This is when we start to see like his own – he's coming to the realization, oh, my God, I'm not as talented. I can never be as talented to be the greats. What am I going to do? And I think these doubts that he's experiencing right now as a young man will eventually lead him to what he actually can be the best at. He knew he did not possess, this is another driver, just skip his name, he knew he did not possess his talent. And he had realized long ago that

his love for the car, which led him to respect her in a race rather than abusing her, as his teammates did, would never allow him to make the final step, the one that separated great drivers from champions. These doubts of not being able to be like them had been on his mind for a long time. So now he knows, okay, I have this passion, I have this love, something I've been obsessed with since a child, but I'll never be the best in the world at it. So what should I do? And so that's when he starts to focus his talents and his determination on commercial interests, where he starts becoming, in other words, an entrepreneur. So he has all these businesses that I told you about, these car dealerships and the like. And this is an example of his determination to not let another business fail and knowing that he's doing too much so he knows

he will fail if he doesn't focus on one goal right and this is causing this is going to cause so he's tormented here that what's what i'm about to read you is going to cause a lot of discomfort and pain in his life it says enzo needed time to think about what he wanted to do in his life races were an important component of his existence but but no longer the only one. Working with Romini, Romini is the executive alpha Romeo that he's learning a lot from. He becomes Romini's right-hand man. Working with Romini, contributing to the development of cars were all things that possess an undeniable appeal for Enzo. The role of technical and commercial advisor to Romini would allow him to remain in an environment that he loved, which is he's not racing cars, but he's still involved with the team, but it would at the same time give him

the opportunity to devote more energy to the entrepreneurial activity as a representative of Alfa Romeo. So it's the car dealerships I told you about. In this state of mind, crowded with too many ideas, often conflicting with each other, I think a lot of entrepreneurs have been there. So this is a, this is a very common. Enzo was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He was about to collapse. The tensions, considerations, and doubts, the haunting memories, fears, and concerns, along with his huge responsibilities were now, were by now an intolerable burden. He facilitated in his thinking about retiring from racing he knew the issue needed to be decided once and for all he couldn't stand another two and a

half months in this state so what's happening he's making the transition here and it's a painful one for him he's giving up on his original dream to be the best race car driver and realizing hey i'm not i can't achieve this dream and that's extremely painful for somebody to go through and yet he also shows the other resourceful aspect of his personality was like okay well that maybe there's there's some positives in here i have a lot of relationships i'm selling cars i'm involved with the racing team i'm developing new cars why don't i follow this path and see where this can lead and that that's an important decision because without making that decision, there is no Ferrari today. But because he went through this, that's my whole point I'm trying to get across.

It's like there is no Ferrari unless he goes through all these trials and tribulations. And he makes the decisions when everybody's affected in their life at times where you have you know you have to choose between one two or two or even more different decisions and it's extremely nerve-wracking because it's not at all obvious and yet you know each decision that each opportunity that you have is going to lead to a vastly different place in your life so how do you go about making that decision and even if you have an idea of where you want to go there there's usually this inner turmoil, this like emotional conflict that we see in these life stories. And so that's going to transition to us, the life of Enzo Ferrari in his 30s. In his 20s, end of his teenage years, in his 20s, he's pursuing full force the passion of racing.

And as he gets to transition into his 30s, he's like, okay, now I'm going full force into business. And the same drive and dedication and obsessiveness that i approach racing with now i'm going to approach my entrepreneurial activity with and so we get a we get an idea of enzo's schedule at 31 years old and it says he was 31 years old with a body that was not really athletic and a profession that saw him in constant motion in the morning he regularly got up before sunrise to sunrise to get to any of the cities in the three regions he ran by the time the people he was meeting arrived at work. So he had car dealerships in three different cities in Italy. He usually skipped lunch to travel to another city or to

meet another client. By late afternoon, he was back in Bologna to make sure that everything proceeded in his branch office. Then he would return to Medina, where he checked out the workshop to ensure that the day's work had been carried out. This, day after day, week after week, month after month. During the weekends, he often went to events scattered all over Italy, where although he rarely raced in person, he kept busy strengthening existing relationships and forging new ones and it was why he was pursuing all these other opportunities so diligently that he he there's an opening that's left for him so the the no i left myself was the large leave gaps for the small this is the start of scuderia ferrari scuderia ferrari sorry i'm probably still pronouncing that incorrectly but

it's still in exists to today. It's a racing team. It's the most successful racing team in history. And it's a business that Ferrari's starting, right? It's the business of being a racing team. And the reason we spend so much time on this is because essentially the same decisions he's making here, in about a decade from now, where we're at in the story, he does those exact same decisions except for himself,

for starting the Ferrari racing team. Because right now, he does those exact same decisions except for himself, for starting the Ferrari racing team. Because right now he's going to start a racing team for Alfa Romeo, right? It's still going to be called Scuderia Ferrari. Eventually it's going to transition from racing Alfa Romeos to racing his own cars. This is an extremely important part of his life to understand who Enzo Ferrari was and how he thought about business. All right. It says Ferrari, for whom racing was both a source of personal reward and income earned from the cars he sold to a generation of rich men looking for a different class of thrill, shared the same doubts and uncertainties about the future of motor racing. So what they're talking about is these are very precarious times in Italian history. And there's a lot of Italian car manufacturers that are pulling out

of racing, right? And in Alfa Romeo's case, they kind of get nationalized by the fascist Mussolini government, okay? So sometimes these car manufacturers say, okay, racing's getting too expensive and it's too, like,'s a distraction so we're gonna pull out of that so when they pull out that that gap leaves an opportunity for small people like Ferrari like oh well yeah you don't want to run a racing team but what if I run a racing team right I'll own the team you'll have a small investment in it but I'll use your cars because you'll get the the promotion when I win it's gonna look great for your team or for your cars and when'll get the promotion. When I win, it's going to look great for your cars. And when I lose, I'll take all the blame. So that's what Ferrari's doing here. But typically,

in the general distress, he also saw an opportunity and quickly seized the moment. If automobile manufacturers were reducing their investments and participation, the moment could be ripe, Ferrari said, for a larger role to be played by a scuderia, private and normally small-scale racing teams that had already been operating, if not flourishing, in the 1920s. He, for one, was ready to take up where manufacturers like Fiat and Alfa Romeo had left off. Enzo Ferrari's reputation for organization possibly was matched only by his charm when it came to persuading an interested audience. Remember at the beginning of the book, we talked about the fact that he had a characterization possibly was matched only by his charm when it came to persuading an interested

audience. Remember at the beginning of the book, we talked about the fact that he had a charisma that anybody that came across him had a hard time resisting. He uses that to his benefit. He anticipated possible reservations on the feasibility of the project and volunteered that the direct involvement of Alfa Romeo and the new racing team was a prerequisite. So he said, listen, I have an idea. I could take over the racing racing but i can't do it alone i gotta go out and convince the people at alfa alfa romeo to let me do this and then he also has to go out and convince all the other car company like things he needs for car uh his car like tires for example he has to go out and he has finn's pirelli to support him and he has to go out and basically organize all this and get everybody to agree

before it can actually form so now we jump to when he's having the meeting to talk to talk alfa romeo into this it says he saved the knockout punch for last by having his racing team enter their cars he said if they won it was alfa romeo that won and if they were defeated the burden would be borne by his scuderia he offered shares in his new racing team in exchange for first-rate technical assistance and demonstrated high-standard logistic support. So basically, he caps their downside and leaves their upside unlimited, right? That's a smart move. Alfa Romeo agreed to take part in this new racing activity promoted by their sales agent.

Remember, it also works as an opportunity because they have a business relationship with him. He has dealerships. He's been selling their cars for many years they know who this guy is so it says um they agree to take part in this new racing activity who is promoted by their sales agent a brilliant 31 year old part-time driver with ambitions that clearly went full circle they would not take more than five percent of the new company's stakes with all that this meant that's a weird sentence, first and foremost was direct access to purchasing the best material available for motor racing. So he needs priority access to parts and to the new designs of their race cars. So he's actually also doing it for his own interests.

He's like, okay, I'm going to race for you, but that means you also have to agree to give me the best technology you guys are developing. Because they develop essentially every year. They make their previous race cars, the previous year's race cars, obsolete. So it's like as long as you're giving me the best technical products that you have, I will win races for you. So I want to go talk to you a little bit more about how Scuderia Ferrari was organized at the very beginning. Again, this is important to realize because he does very similar things when he's starting the car company Ferrari. So he says, having won over Alfa Romeo, he had to complete the operation by involving tire manufacturer

Pirelli in the adventure. As with Alfa Romeo, Enzo was not so much in search of capital, for that would be provided by his wealthy gentleman driver partners. Okay, I got to pause right there. Remember how I told you that he made it a point to study and learn from people that already accomplished what he wanted to do? One of these was this race car driver named Ascari. So not only he's a couple years older than Ferrari, what does he do? Ascari goes out and starts to win races, so then Ascari opens car dealerships. Ferrari wins races, then he opens car dealerships like Ascari.

Then Ascari starts his own race race team ferrari starts in a race team he essentially copies this guy and he talks about ascari for the rest of his life that's the the influence that because ascari is going to die a few years from now in a um in a race uh he dies early he's like 36 years old something like that so anyways something else that he stole and learned from ascari was every other everybody else started a racing team and they had to to rely on the support of financial support of car manufacturers. But Ascari is like, well, that doesn't make sense because they change their mind from year to year. Some years they'll give you full financial support.

Some years they say, hey, we're diverting resources elsewhere and you're kind of screwed. So these racing teams are opening up and closing at the whims of these large companies. It's not a good place to be. So what Ascari realizes is like, well, the people buying the cars from me, you have pro race drivers, and then right under that, you have really rich guys in Italy and I guess all over the world at this point that buy the cars from them, and then they enter. They're like weekend warriors, to think of it like that.

They want to race, but they're not going to do it full time. And so what Ascari realized, and what Ferrari's going to's going to copy is like hey you guys have a lot of money you guys have a passion and you you want to support racing why don't you why don't we start our own team and all run the team and you you foot the bill since you guys are already already rich and you're interested in this anyways so ascar is the first one to crack this code where the people were like hey i love this so much i'm willing i want to essentially be an owner of a race car team well ferrari does is like i'm going to copy ascar i'm gonna i have just like he has a bunch of clients that are really rich and a passionate about racing i'll go to my really rich clients and say hey i'm gonna run my own

my uh own race team do you want to support it and not only do you financially support it but i'll let you race in some of the races it's a really smart move what he's doing here he's just really really this is what i mean about like people a lot of times people confuse education with intelligence and they're they're two totally opposite things enzo is not educated but he's extremely intelligent he's extremely intelligent to one thing and that's all you only have to be extremely intelligent on one thing in your life and you can have a vastly successful like outlier-sized success in your life. You just got to get good at one thing and dedicate your time and effort to it. That's why entrepreneurship is one of the best things in the world.

All right, let's go back to this. Okay, so Enzo was not so much in search of capital, meaning from Alfa Romeo or Pirelli, although they were on a little bit of money, but because that would be provided by his wealthy gentleman driver partners who were far more inclined to risk their own money than established companies were. He was more interested in making Pirelli part of the game much as much as he had done with alfa romeo in order to gain direct access to to a tire supplier with a precise interest in serving his scuderia as best that it could doing the same thing i want your best products to give me your best products when i win races they're like look I won races on Pirelli tires. It's very,

like he understood human nature. He was a master at understanding human nature. He's like, I'm aligning my interests. You have no downside. Give me your tires. Cost you almost nothing. And then when inevitably I go on to win races, it's going to make you look really good. Who's not going to take that deal? They're all going to take that deal. Though a minority partner of the company, Enzo was without question the central person of the whole endeavor, the originator and the brains of the operation, the energy behind the future activity, and the scudarious assurance of success. So I'm going to read that to you again. What does that mean? Most of the people financing it, they get all the shares. He gets, you know, I forgot what percentage was. Alfa Romeo, Pirelli, these other

guys, they get, you know, let's say that he's given everybody else 5% of the shares. Maybe he keeps 15, 20% of himself. The vast majority is owned by the people financing it, which eventually that changes and they get bought out later on. But I want to read this to you again because the same way his Scuderia is organized is how he ran his company, even though he's not a minority partner in Ferrari.

He's a minority partner in this because he doesn't have a lot of assets at this time. When he does have assets, he controls everything until he sells to Fiat later on. So it says, Enzo is without question the central person of the whole endeavor. Same true for, that's going to hold true for his car company. The originator and the brains of the operation, the energy behind the future activity and the assurance of success. And so now we see this completely dedicated Enzo that he basically maintains this level of focus for the rest of his life. Here's a little bit of illustration of that in his own words. He says he would write that a man dominated by a passion like mine, with the risks, with the time it requires,

cannot be a good husband and above all, cannot be a good father. In other words, he knows the trade-off that he's making. Work over family. That's the trade-off that Enzo made in his life. And it was also around this time that we start to see the black and white approach that Ferrari had. If you were working with him towards his goal, you were an associate, you were inside, you were good. The minute, even after years of service, the minute that he felt that you were no longer dedicated to his goal, you were dead. You're just dead to him.

And so this is what an associate was to Enzo Ferrari. Associates was the word that henceforth in Enzo Ferrari's lexicon would indicate those who, inside or outside of his business business worked for his team's success. So if you did that you were on his good side. But the minute you could work for him for 20 years, the minute you stopped working for his goal, you'd be replaced. He was unbelievably ruthless. So this is how Enzo Ferrari is described at 33 years old. This is from an industry magazine. It says, Ferrari was enjoying the reputation of an excellent businessman. When he raced, he ended up earning good money.

Now that he races less, he still finds a way to make money. So they're picking up on the fact that most racers, they stop racing. If they didn't make a lot of money, they don't know what to do next. Ferrari didn't have that problem transitioning. So they asked, is he lucky? And the answer is no, he's skilled, but he's a balanced tactician. He's shrewd and he's energetic all the time. He's a man who knows what he wants. He's a real organizer. He's a, this is such a weird sentence,

but I think it's pretty good. A practical value increaser of his abilities. He's a champion who never goes off the road as one who goes off the road, never ends up the manager and the businessman. And all while he's doing this, he does something really smart. He makes himself indispensable. So this is the role that Ferrari creates for himself. As he's getting into this beef with one of his drivers, who's a really big star, and the driver's like, I'm the really big star. And, you know, the driver's like, I'm the most important part. And he didn't understand how important Ferrari had become. And so this is a good description of that. The driver had understood little or nothing

of the role that Enzo Ferrari had carved out for himself four years earlier. Always in precarious but profitable equilibrium between the changing plans of Alfa Romeo, driver's extravagances, technical supplier needs, race organizers demands, sponsor requests, sponsors requests, and pressure from the press. And it was the proof that Enzo Ferrari's role was of such paramount importance as to be difficult to define and to understand. And it's during this time of wild success that we see one of his most known and I would say most liked traits. And essentially Enzo Ferrari is telling us by, if you look at his behavior or his actions, not to rest on your laurels. So it says, it had been a month of enormous satisfaction for Ferrari, eight races, seven wins. But the mind of Ferrari was typically

already on to the next race. He'd celebrate for maybe an hour, maybe that day, and then completely forget it and go to the next one. A few pages later, another note of myself reminded me of Jeff Bezos. For Enzo Ferrari, it is always day one. And it says, it implied above all a very personal attitude that Ferrari had begun to adopt when contemplating the achievements of his working life, where each victory or accomplishment was only the starting point for the next. Okay, so I'm skipping ahead. He's going to run Scuderia Ferrari for many years. So it's what, eight years, I think, before Alfa Romeo is going to pull the plug.

Because even though he owns the company, owns part of the company, he's running the company, he still relies on Alfa Romeo for a lot of the cars and the technical assistance. And so this is going to be the last straw or the last thing that has to happen to Ferrari till he eventually never, after this is going to happen, after Alfa pulls out and the Scuderia is shelved temporarily, closed down, this is the last time in his life that he's ever going to rely on anybody else. Okay, so it says, from one day to the next, Scuderia Ferrari disappeared. For Enzo Ferrari, who had invested eight years of his life in the Scuderia Ferrari disappeared. For Enzo Ferrari, who had invested eight years of his life in the Scuderia with all the physical and mental energy he could muster, it was a bitter day. In eight

years, Scuderia Ferrari had participated in 225 races with a total of 1,715 cars. It had obtained 144 victories and 171 podium finishes. It had played an important part in European motorsports and had for a long time shaped the Italian racing environment. Now it was being shut down without any public word of gratitude. The only satisfaction Enzo received was that it had made him rich. Okay, so one thing, or two things here. Other people were like, oh, what Enzo's doing is not that hard him rich. Okay. So one thing or two things here, other people was like, Oh, what Enzo's doing is not that hard. I'm going to start my own race. The important part is he's winning all these races and he's doing so profitably. There's tons

of other people that saw what Enzo was doing, try to emulate it. And then they didn't have his like organization and management skill and they would start losing money, eventually go into the red and then they'd go out of business. Right. and then the second thing is it's being pulled because we're in the time of history we're in like the 1930s uh let's say mid to late 1930s essentially alfa romeo becomes state-run for all intents and purposes and their decision making at the top is like erratic right we're about to jump off with the largest war in history this is what's happening here where they have new new people in positions of leadership that are put there by the government alfa romeo that are ones pulling the plug on this so it is important that hey now that enzo had to go through this because it gave him enough money and enough resolve where

it's like i have enough money i'm just going to fund my own thing and and and now i'm going to i'm going to revive the scuderia and then i'm going to start making my own car car so this is extremely important part of his life he says the liquidation of the scooteria in fact provided him with more than a million lira goes into like all his assets i'll skip over that part he also gets a job so this is kind of the way big bureaucracies work it's weird it's like oh we're spending too much time and attention over here so we're going to liquidate this but then we're going to give you essentially they just they give them they overpay them. So he gets money from the liquidation, and it says, at the same time, Enzo was named head of Alpha Corsae,

a new department that he would help create. So this is working essentially for the large corporation of Alpha Romeo. Giving up his independence must have cost him a lot, even from the point of view of personal pride. But in addition to the millionaire settlement he received, from this point forward, Alpha Romeo would pay him a stunning salary, 190,000 lira a year. So it's a time, to put it into context, like a typical laborer would make, let's say, 1,000 lira a month. And he's making 16,000.

And it's kind of, how would I put this? He's getting paid and he has duties, but then they say you never have to show up. So he's kind of like, I don't know if it's called golden handcuffs or whatever the term is, but essentially he's got a high-paying job for a job he doesn't really have to do much for. But he doesn't care about, again, it's not just the money. For him, he had a passion. He doesn't want to stop doing that. So now we turn to a very important paragraph in the book and a very important time in his life. In the winter of 1938, the personal future of

Enzo Ferrari was a difficult puzzle to decipher. In some ways, the previous eight years had been annulled. On February 18th, he turned 40, an age at which a man could begin to see his life in some perspective, or at least a part of it. if on one hand he could be proud of what he had done which he certainly should have right on the other he couldn't help but realize that the past 18 years had been wiped out by an irrational decision that had little or nothing to do with motor racing so that's what i was referencing earlier how a lot of these decisions are being made by people they're not in business, they're people in government. And unfortunately, one of those casualties of these irrational decisions was the original scuderia Ferrari. Okay, so right around this time, he's like, I'm rich, and I'm still passionate.

I'm 40. I have a lot more work to do. Like, I'm just essentially getting started. And that's the kind of the message I want to send to you is like, you know, everybody thinks like, oh, I want to build a company, I think's going to happen overnight ferrari had to go through multiple decades to learn to to become the person qualified enough to build what eventually becomes ferrari that's why they said he was eventually becoming ferrari because the man and the company were kind of inseparable but he you can't just wake up in a day and and think you're going to do that he had to go through all these experiences because through these experiences, he was gaining knowledge, the knowledge that he needed to build the products that he eventually would build

and to build a company he eventually would build, the one that's still in existence to this day. His son, Dino, dies at 24. He has a son with his mistress that no one really knows about. His son, to this day, his son wants to become a billionaire because he owns 10% of Ferrari. Ferrari sells 50% to Fiat and then made a deal when he dies that Fiat can buy the other 40%, but the other 10% has to go to his son.

And just having 10% of the company has made his son a billionaire. It's amazing. This is his state of mind when he founds Ferrari. At 42, Ferrari wanted to persuade the outside world that the degree of celebrity this is his own world his own words that the degree of celebrity that i had achieved was the legitimate consequence of my here's that word again of my stubborn work and of my attitudes in essence he concluded it was time to show how far i could get on my own

in establishing a new company, Enzo remembered what he had learned from his father, and he did not look for any partner. When he had founded Scuderia Ferrari 10 years earlier, his financial situation had prevented him from being the only shareholder. Now, however, he was in the position of being able to go it alone. And we've seen similar situations. I mean, the history of business, the history of entrepreneurship is scattered with examples like this, where you have to work yourself into a position to where you can have complete control and you can be the number one person in charge. My mind immediately goes to James Dyson, who spent, you know, 14 years. By the time he rips open the Hoover vacuum and is frustrated,

to the time he has a prototype and that he owns 100%, he went through like 5,127 prototypes in 14 years. Now he had partners in between that, he had other companies, but the Dyson that he still owns to this day, the one that has made him a billionaire many times over, the one that produces some of the best products in the world. It took 14 years and many failed partnerships to get to that point. Same thing for Ferrari here. Now, so he has this goal at 40, still working at 42. It's not till he's 48 years old till he realizes it because he's sidetracked by World War II. So I'm going to skip over a lot of the stuff on World War II. I mean, listen, the book is almost 1,000 pages long. I'm leaving a lot out, and it's a fascinating read,

although it takes a freaking long time to read. So I have to skip over this. He has to stop producing cars. For the war, he has to make machines. They're like hydraulic machines that are used to make ball bearings, and then his factory is bombed by the Allies. And so I'm going to skip over all that because I'm almost at where I want—I'm almost at what I feel is the most important part of his life. But first, I want to tell you that there's also elements of his personality that have nothing to do with car racing and the fact that he did try to do his best to help others during the war.

This is one of the the if not the greatest tragedy in all of human history world war ii and um he's living in a country that you know that people are being killed just for their religion or their or their race in addition to in addition to the resistance ferrari had also helped the jews even more concretely than he'd helped his friend levi before the war specifically he, he hid a Polish woman and her three children from the Germans in a barn located on the plains between the city and the hills, personally taking care of the four fugitives. He quietly fed and clothed them until the end of the war,

out of his own pocket, risking his own life. So that's an insight into his personality that when he thought something was the right thing to do he'd not only risk his own money but if he would have got caught doing that they would have killed him and there was even rumors that uh because he wasn't playing ball with the mussolini government that there was a discussion whether they should kill ferrari or not and then he decided not to okay so now the war ends and after the war enzo is able to focus on his main goal. So this is now production.

He could resume production and he had to wait all the way until mid-1946. So Enzo Ferrari did not waste much time before deciding to get rid of the hydraulic grinding machines that had enabled him to survive during the war, but which represented the antithesis of his life dream the idea was to keep the production going only to finance the development and construction of his first automobile this is the very first ferrari the one that he is going to own the one he's going to manufacture and the one that he's going to race he builds his first car he starts racing racing them. So now he's realized his dream. He's going to win. And just like I talked last week, and when I talked about the podcast with the Wright brothers,

and even on some of the Henry Ford podcasts, winning automobile races for a small car manufacturer was huge. And that changes Ferrari's fortunes forever. He starts winning over and over again, and that gives the foundation to build the Ferrari company okay so I want to close on this which I think is the single most important part of his life remember I asked you to remember uh to to keep in your mind when he was what 18 20 years old he's crying he's in Turin he's crying on that that bench after being rejected by Fiat right isn't it just some kind of beautiful poetry that fiat's the one that winds up buying his company like 10 years 15 years where we're at in the story okay so he takes his car to a race it's the grand turimo or something like that it's in turin and they win it's a huge day for him so

after the race this is what he does in the moment of triumph once the celebration had ended and there was no more compliments to receive, the last interview over and his notebooks closed and he was away from prying eyes, there was one last thing that Enzo Ferrari wanted to do before leaving. There was a precise spot where he wanted to go, not far from the finish line, of a race that had meant so much to him and that represented a milestone in his professional life. Nearby there was a milestone in his professional life. Nearby there was a bench in Valentino Park.

It was like all the others, made out of wood and wrought iron. For almost 30 years that bench had represented a starting point for him, and now he knew a goal. On that bench he had found comfort on that day in November of 1918 when Fiat had denied him a job. Today, on the day of his first prestigious win by a car that bore his name, Enzo Ferrari had come to pay a debt he had with himself. He left his men and ventured into the park, alone, as he had been 30 years earlier. He searched for that specific bench that for three decades had populated

his nightmares. He found it, sat on it, and wept, just as he had wept out of despair in the fall of 1918. The tears of that day in October of 1947 had a very different taste. Tears were included because only the complete replication of what he had done and suffered 29 years earlier would set him free. For Enzo Ferrari, this ceremony marked the end of the first part of his existence. And I'm going to leave the story there. We now know everything that happened from that day until the rest of his days was his complete and utter dedication

to manufacturing and racing Ferraris, something that occupied every thought he had until the day he died at 90 years old. So for the full story, I recommend reading the book, Enzo Ferrari, Power of Politics and the Making of an Automotive Empire. story, I recommend reading the book, Enzo Ferrari, Power Politics and the Making of an Automotive Empire. If you want to read the book and support the podcast at the same time, I'll leave a link down in the show notes. Thank you very much for listening.

Thank you very much for your support. Please tell a friend about the podcast and I will talk to you next week.