Enzo Ferrari by Brock Yates

Author:Brock Yates
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241977170
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

13.

The jumble of change that had swept through Enzo Ferrari’s professional life at the end of 1955 appeared on balance to present new opportunities. But they paled in the face of the disaster that was developing in the tiny apartment above the old Scuderia garage on the Viale Trento e Trieste. Dino was dying. An enigmatic disease was ravaging his young body. He was spending more and more time in bed and in the local hospital, constantly tended by his mother, Laura, and visited, after the press of business, by his father.

Alfredino Ferrari was by all accounts a fine young man, open and affable with friends, but shy and withdrawn around strangers. American racing driver Carroll Shelby spent many hours with the youth during the summer and autumn of 1955 and recalls him losing weight while his legs became so stiff that he had difficulty walking even within the constricted environs of the Scuderia. Despite later claims of attentiveness by Ferrari during this period, Shelby insists that the boy was left to fend for himself, idling away the days with the mechanics and customers who jammed the bustling old Scuderia building. By now all manufacturing had been transferred to Maranello, and the old works was employed strictly as a new-car delivery center. Dino, unlike his father, could speak English, which brought him closer to Shelby and the rich Americans and Britons who were appearing in Modena.

Dino had tried hard to exploit his strong interest in automobiles to the extent his failing health would permit. He had enrolled in the local Corni Technical Institute, which had become something of a farm system for aspiring Ferrari technicians, then taken a year with the economics faculty at Bologna University before the rigors of a full-time academic life forced him to withdraw. It is part of the Ferrari mythology that Dino then took a correspondence course from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and completed a thesis on the design of a 1.5-liter 4-cylinder engine with an interesting valve layout.

He was allegedly helped first by Lampredi and then by young Andrea Fraschetti, a talented engineer and draftsman. But there is a problem; no one named Ferrari is on record at Fribourg during the 1950s, nor is there one on the rolls at the University of Freiburg in Germany or at Switzerland’s premier technical school at Lausanne. Moreover, Fribourg is noted as a school for the humanities, not engineering, which places Dino’s entire background as a fledgling engineer in limbo.

While Dino never raced because of his health, his father provided him with a number of cars which he drove with enthusiasm – first a tiny Fiat 1100 and finally a 2-liter Ferrari in which he and his close friend Sergio Sighinolfi sported about in the nearby hills. But as the gloom of the Modena winter of 1955–56 gathered around him, his tall, rangy frame was too debilitated for driving and he was forced to spend more and more of his hours confined to his room.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.