Enzo Ferrari: A life of triumph and tragedy hits big screen

"If you get into one of my cars, you get in to win," Enzo Ferrari says in a new movie about the entrepreneur and founder of the Scuderia Ferrari Grand Prix motor racing team.

Ferrari's determination to win did have a price, though. He and his team faced financial ruin, and some of his drivers paid with their lives in the race to finish first.

Directed by Michael Mann and written by Troy Kennedy Martin, "Ferrari" is based on the 1991 biography "Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine" by Brock Yates. The sports drama follows the personal and professional struggles of Enzo Ferrari, played by the aptly named Adam Driver.

Those struggles include the death of his son Dino, his deteriorating marriage with his wife Laura, portrayed in the film by Penelope Cruz, and his company's potential bankruptcy.

Burning ambition that needed a spark

Born in Modena in northern Italy in 1898, Enzo Ferrari grew up with little formal education. A seminal moment occurred when he was just 10 years old, as he witnessed Felice Nazzaro win at the 1908 Circuito di Bologna. The event had a profound effect on Enzo, and inspired him to one day become a racing driver.

World War I would delay those ambitions, as Enzo served under the 3rd Mountain Artillery Regiment of the Italian Army. Though Enzo survived the war, he endured the loss of both his older brother, Alfredo Jr., and his father, Alfredo, with the pair dying due to a flu outbreak in Italy in 1916.

Enzo himself would be struck down during the 1918 flu pandemic and was consequently discharged from the Italian military.

A year later, Enzo fulfilled his dream of becoming a racing driver, and in 1920 joined the Alfa Romeo team.

But it wouldn't be long before he experienced tragedy again, with the deaths of two racing pioneers, Ugo Sivocci in 1923 and Antonio Ascari in 1925. Deeply affected by the loss of his good friends and colleagues, Enzo Ferrari went on racing half-heartedly, and started looking more towards the organizational aspects of motor racing. 

The birth of his son Dino in 1932 led him to retire from racing. From then on, he rather concentrated on managing his team of superstar drivers, called Scuderia Ferrari, which Enzo had founded in 1929. 

On the verge

While still working with Alfa Romeo, the Ferrari brand did emerge in the 1930s, with the now famous Prancing Horse logo beginning to show up on the cars.

With the outbreak of World War II, Ferrari's factory was forced to undertake war production for Mussolini's fascist government. After relocating from Modena to Maranello in 1943, the factory bombed during by the Allies, but the rebuilt workshop and remains the home of the Formula One team to this day.

After the war, Ferrari decided to start making cars bearing his name, produced for the Ferrari S.p.A. company, which he had founded in 1939.

When the first season of the Formula One World Drivers' Championship took place in 1950, the Ferrari team was an obvious entrant. Within two years they had their first world champion driver in Alberto Ascari (the son of late Antonio Ascari), and the Ferrari legend was born.

A 'deadly passion'

There would be trouble ahead, though, as portrayed in the film, set in 1957.

He was still devastated by his son Dino's early death in 1956, at the age of 24, from the degenerative disease Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The loss didn't help his rocky relationship with his wife Laura. 

It is also around that same period that his empire began to crumble. Financial ruin was on the horizon. 

"How?" Enzo asks incredulously in the movie, highlighting a sense of losing touch with reality.

"You spend more than you make," comes the dry response from his financial advisor.

While his feet may not always have been on the ground, keeping four wheels on the asphalt was an obsession that was only bettered by his desperation to go faster.

That same year, Ferrari had one last throw of the dice, entering his racing team to the 1957 Mille Miglia, a race held on a course totaling roughly 1500 km — or a thousand Roman miles — made up entirely of public roads around Italy. 

At the iconic race, the victory delivered by driver Piero Taruffi (played in the biopic by Patrick Dempsey) saved the team from bankruptcy.

But again, the price was a hefty one, as the race was marred by the death of Alfonso de Portago and his co-driver, as well as 10 spectators, including five children, after his Ferrari 335 S crashed near the village of Guidizzolo. A tyre had burst while driving along a dead straight road at 250 kilometers per hour (160 mph), flinging Portago's Ferrari into the air, toward the watching audience.

Three days after the race, the Italian government put an end to the Mille Miglia and banned all motor racing on the public roads of Italy. Enzo Ferrari was charged with manslaughter, though he was finally dismissed in 1961.

The focus on this period in Ferrari's life would appear to be a logical one, as it brings to a head the tumultuous life of the car manufacturer, in the form of controversy, death, tragedy, and a win-at-all-costs mentality that still lives on in the sport today.

Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier