Ferrari: when Luca Cordero di Montezemolo began his era in Maranello

Six world titles for the drivers, eight in the constructors’ championship and seven other potential titles vanished in the last race: this is the balance of Ferrari under the leadership of Luca Cordero di Montezemolo. On 31 October 1991 his adventure at the helm of the Scuderia from Maranello as President began, a choice by Gianni Agnelli to revive the Red team following the failure of the Alain Prost operation, who arrived at Ferrari in 1990, a season that was consigned to history for the yet another duel with Ayrton Senna, which ended like 12 months before with a contact in the last race of the championship at Suzuka in Japan.

Starting again was not easy, but piece by piece Montezemolo composed a puzzle that led to Michael Schumacher’s five world titles from 2000 to 2004, with Jean Todt and Ross Brawn in the pit wall and Rory Byrne in the role of designer. The title won in 2000 ended a period that had lasted since 1979, when Jody Scheckter won the title for the Italian side. Montezemolo experienced the successes of Niki Lauda, leaving the Scuderia from Maranello for the first time in 1977 ‘ together with the Austrian driver destined for Brabham. Here are some excerpts from the editorial edited by Leo Turrini and published in the Italian newspaper based in Bologna, Resto del Carlino, Nazione e Giorno on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Luca di Montezemolo’s appointment as president of Ferrari.

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“[…] It was an almost intimate personal choice of Gianni Agnelli, he did not want to allow Ferrari to end up like Lancia and Alfa Romeo […] It was a fortune, that decision […] today the Cavallino is worth more than thirty billion euro on the stock market […] From the autumn of 1991 to the autumn of 2014, when Montezemolo was liquidated without thanks by the lawyer’s heirs, Ferrari has definitively transformed into a global icon […] After 2014, after the end of the Montezemolo era, the Ferrari of the rough Marchionne and the pale Elkann never even reached the final kilometer of a championship to fight for something. Coincidences? I do not think so. I believe instead that Luca (and Gianni Agnelli understood this perfectly) was a Ferrari driver “inside”. He had collaborated as a boy with the Drake, in the days of Lauda. And he had Emilian roots, so you didn’t have to waste time with him explaining what the uniqueness of the Maranello team was. He already knew […] Mistakes, he made some. Especially in the final phase of his mandate, when he accepted the removal of tests for F1 cars, he hastily joined the hybrid turn of the power units underestimating the time needed for Ferrari on this matter, he could not keep in Emilia Ross Brawn, then father of the Mercedes era, and he trusted Fernando Alonso too much, on impulse firing an engineer as good as Aldo Costa. And yet, the balance remains extraordinarily positive […] ”.