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The Ferrari Golden Years, Ford, and the Dino
Ferrari didn’t miss a
beat following The Purge. His cars won 
The 1966 Ferrari 330 P3 (background).
All the while, the road cars were fortifying their standing as the world’s best high-performance sports and GT automobiles. Production more than doubled over four years.
It was a luster that proved quite appealing to Ford Motor Company in the early 1960s. America’s No. 2 automaker was trying to cultivate a more youthful audience, and performance was the hot ticket. Nothing symbolized speed and horsepower better than racetrack success, and in the early ’60s, international racing success was spelled Ferrari.
Ferrari came into
focus on Ford’s radar screen in January 1963. CEO Henry Ford II and his top
lieutenant, Lee Iacocca, hatched the idea of purchasing the Italian automaker
to jump-start Ford’s assault on
Unbeknownst to most
everyone, Ford included, was that Ferrari was already in negotiations over the
sale of his company to a stalwart client: the wealthy Mecom family of
Ford’s first contact
with Ferrari was in May 1963, through the American company’s Italian
subsidiary. According to a 1966 account in Road & Track, Ford Vice
President and General Manager Donald Frey traveled to
Frey said the framework for a deal was settled upon fairly quickly. There were to be two companies. One, called Ford-Ferrari, would be responsible for the gran turismos Ferrari was already building. The second, Ferrari-Ford, would construct competition cars. Ford would be the majority shareholder of the road-car arm. Enzo Ferrari would be the largest shareholder in the racing company.
Ten days of intense
negotiations collapsed when it became apparent Enzo wanted complete control of
Ferrari-Ford. Frey returned to
With that, an epic
automotive David versus Goliath battle was joined. It would last the better
part of five years.
But endless money didn’t guarantee immediate victory. In 1964, GT40s powered by 4.7-liter Ford V-8s couldn’t unseat Ferrari’s proven V-12 sports prototypes. So Ford responded in a proper American hot rod way: It got a bigger engine.
Armed with Ford’s
NASCAR-based 7-liter V-8, the GT40 Mk II appeared at Le Mans in 1965, and
though it lost to another midengine V-12 Ferrari, GT40 Mk IIs came back to
finish 1-2-3 in the ’66 race. GT40 variants would win
Enzo Ferrari was far from idle during this period. He rallied his troops, and they responded.
“When The Old Man
wanted something you didn’t say no,”
remembered Brenda Vernor, who moved from
“So we [often] worked all day Sunday, and Monday morning I would find a little present on my desk with a card. He didn’t say ‘thank you’ but you knew he was in effect thanking you for your effort.
“I can recall a
number of times taking food and wine to the mechanics at one or two in the
morning. They too would not say ‘no’ to The Old Man. For these men it was also
a joy to work for him.”
The Ferrari 250 P.
Ferrari was the last
manufacturer to win
Ferrari’s use of the midengine configuration in racing was not lost on the company’s sales force, its coachbuilders or its clientele. In the mid 1960s, a conflict over a midengine road car was seething behind the scenes at Maranello.
Sergio Pininfarina had personally handled his carrozzeria’s Ferrari account since his father had landed it in 1952. For much of 1965, he had locked horns with a conservative, truculent Enzo, trying to convince him to produce a road-going midengine machine.
“He kept insisting it was too dangerous,” the effervescent coachbuilder said. “While he felt it was fine for racing and professional drivers, he … was afraid of the safety, of building a car that was too dangerous for customers. That’s why he was preparing the front engine with rear drive, the classic layout. The idea of having all the weight in the back was upsetting to him.”
Even the
unprecedented hoopla generated by the 1966 unveiling of Lamborghini’s
avant-garde midengine Miura couldn’t persuade Enzo to change his mind. “I
insisted and insisted and insisted,” Pininfarina recalled. “All the salesmen
were with me. We had dramatic meetings in Maranello in which the salesmen and
myself were pushing for a midengine.”
The 1968 Ferrari Dino 206 GT.
Pininfarina’s barrage
finally yielded some results: Ferrari approved the experimental Dino for
production. This one-off prototype came from Sergio’s fertile mind, and broke
cover at the Paris Auto Show in 1965. A second, more-refined prototype was
shown the following year at
The preproduction version appeared 12 months later and the world soon had its first road-going midengine “Ferrari,” though this beautiful V-6 two-seater was manufactured in cooperation with Fiat and did not, in fact, carry a Ferrari badge.
“When Mr. Ferrari finally said yes,” Pininfarina recalled, “he said ‘Okay, you make it not with a Ferrari name, but as a Dino.’ This was because the Dino was a less powerful car and in his [mind], less powerful meant less danger for the customers. I therefore had the permission to develop [it].”
In next few years, labor unrest in Europe and new safety and emissions regulations in America made life miserable for Enzo Ferrari. Learn how Ferrari weathered this period on the next page.
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