Enzo Ferrari

"Il secondo è il primo dei perdenti. (The runner-up is the first of losers.)"

"They are cars which the sporting client can use on the road during the week and race on Sundays."

"His death has deprived us of a great champion - one that I loved very much. My past is scarred with grief; parents, brother, son. My life is full of sad memories. I look back and see the faces of my loved ones, and among them I see him."

"I had deluded myself - as fathers often do - that our attentions would help [Dino] to regain his health. I had convinced myself that [Dino] was like one of my cars, and so I made a table of the calorific values of the various food he had to eat - types of food that would not harm his kidneys - and I kept an up-to-date daily record of his albumins, of the specific gravity of his urine, the level of urea in his blood, of his diuresis, etc., so I would have an indication of the process of the disease. The sad truth was quite different: my son was gradually wasting away with progressive muscular dystrophy. He was dying of that terrible disease which no one has ever been able to understand or cure, and against which there is no defense, aside from genetic prophylaxis (i.e. a medication or a treatment designed and used to prevent a disease from occurring)."

"Among musicians, I had a true friend, Maestro Cantelli. He was a young man of particularly noble sentiments."

"One day in Modena I was entering a restaurant when I recognized Ferrari sitting at one of the tables. As I passed I tried to greet him, but he turned his head away and pretended to be talking to the person next to him. He was ignoring me! I used to have contact with Adolfo and Omer Orsi of Maserati, Renzo Rivolta of ISO, even Alejandro de Tomaso. But Ferrari never spoke to me again. He was a great man, I admit, but it was so very easy to upset him."

"Now, finally, the news is confirmed, the rumors fact. Enzo Ferrari died the evening of August 14, and while that may be trite, it is also true that an era ushers away with him. He was the first, and also the last, of the great autocrats of auto racing. Red cars will continue to be built in the little town near Modena, but other hands, perhaps susceptible to influences beyond a pure love of racing cars, will be in control. For that Ferrari undoubtedly had. Thirty and 40 years ago he began producing road cars, disliking intensely that the majority were ordered by rich dilettantes, people attracted by the kudos of the name, probable incapable of driving a Ferrari properly. There was no Fiat money there in those days, and the road cars were seen as an evil necessary to pay for the racing program. It was an attitude that persisted to the end of the old man's life."

"My heart has always beat a little faster for Ferraris, and there is no distinction in that. Captivation by them is almost irresistible. All that charisma, magic, call it what you will, has plundered the emotions of racing fans as no other cars ever have, or ever will. Paint a race car red, and already you are halfway there. But the rest is less easy to pin down, a hodgepodge of remembered sights and sounds; black on yellow Prancing Horse sheilds on the cockpits of Ascari, Hawthorn, Lauda, Berger; exposed gear lever gates, "PROVA MO" stencil marks. And the mystique, of course, began with the enigma from whom the cars took their name. A man of contradictions, on occasion chillingly ruthless, yet capable of surprising sentimentality."

"Competition among Ferrari drivers was always encouraged. The Ingegnere- he hated being called Commendatore- especially relished chargers in the red cars. Recrimination was always on the cards for a man who settled for a safe second, never for one who had destroyed a car trying to be first."

"Ferrari's love of his cars was an abstract thing. For the actual machinery there was no sentiment whatsoever. Millionaires across the world may devote themselves to collecting Ferraris, but the Old Man hadn't a sliver of interest in what he saw as museum pieces. The future was the thing, and the cars were routinely broken up once their useful purpose had been served. The classic shark-nose cars dominated the 1961 season, for example, but not a single example survives. At any given time, however, his passion for the current cars was the major force in his life."

"Still, the lure of Ferrari was always very real. "When I first went there," Stefan Johansson said, "and saw Mr. Ferrari, I was as nervous as if I'd been meeting royalty. Even if I don't get the drive, I thought at least one of my dreams has been fulfilled." He had that effect on people, this immaculately dressed old man with the ever-present sunglasses. At Ferrari press conferences, we always felt like schoolboys again, waiting for Morning Assembly, and it saddens me deeply to realize we shall not do it again. Racing people across the world will be feeling as I do, now that the greatest of their gods is gone."