Collectors & Aficionados
815, a war machine
This article discusses the significance of Enzo Ferrari's departure from Alfa Romeo in 1938 and how it impacted his future career as a car manufacturer.
The divorce between Ferrari and Alfa Romeo, although initially appearing like a defeat for Enzo, was in fact a fundamental and extremely fortuitous moment for his future career as a manufacturer. 1938 had been a disastrous year for Alfa Romeo in racing and the engineer Gobbato, General Manager of the Company which, let’s not forget, was owned by the Italian State, was not convinced by the organization that Ferrari had brought with him from Modena to Milan, using the same approach as he had always done with the Scuderia.
For Ferrari, the organization had to be agile and quick to make decisions. For Gobbato, a pragmatic engineer, everything needed to be calculated and planned. Another element that contributed towards making this situation even more tense was a man Enzo despised, a Spanish engineer called Wifredo Ricart who supported Gobbato’s thesis by underlining the fact that Ferrari was neither an engineer nor a technician.
