Opinion: Enzo Ferrari wasn’t a saint. Time for Ferrari to acknowledge it

So I drove the Ferrari 849 Testarossa Spider recently. And it was all very extraordinary, a monument to Maranello’s ability to distil furious complexity into surprising simplicity.

It's a skill that extends to the mythologising of its own founding father.

Because to spend any time with Ferrari is to be reminded of how heavily the ghost of Enzo lingers over the company. There’s a good reason for that: Ferrari doesn’t half love inviting Enzo’s ghost to linger.

In every tech presentation, in every press release, there he is, Il Commendatore, rendered in film-star black-and-white, inscrutable behind the sunglasses, invoked in reverent tones. The good lord Enzo, Ferrari’s north star.

A typical sample from Ferrari: “Our founder’s teachings, his visionary spirit, his drive to audaciously redefine the limits of possible, and his deeply rooted passion for motor sport all continue to define who we are today.”

This is Enzo painted as pure, saintly engineering spirit: the Mother Teresa and Sir David Attenborough of motorsport-derived performance.

True, companies eulogising their founders as godlike figures is not unusual, especially when it’s the founder’s name above the door. But maybe what’s strange about the Enzo-worship is… he’s not been gone that long. Less than 40 years. Plenty of folk who worked with Enzo are still around.

And few people who spent time with Enzo ever described him as a pure, saintly engineering spirit. Here was a man who treated his customers with disdain and his racing drivers somewhat worse. Who would excommunicate his closest allies for the slightest perceived lack of loyalty. Who kept a secret second family.

Ferrari’s recasting of Enzo is, if nothing else, in a grand Italian tradition. The Ancient Greeks understood that gods could be brilliant and capricious at the same time. The Romans preferred deities that embodied order and civilisation. If Enzo was any kind of god, he was Greek. Ferrari has quietly promoted him to the Roman pantheon.

Again, this is far from unusual. But in Ferrari’s case, I wonder if recasting Enzo as simple ol’ Engineering Santa Claus ends up selling the cars a little short. Because supercars – and our relationships with them – aren’t simple and straightforward.

The 849 Testarossa Spider, after all, is inherently absurd. It’s a thousand-horsepower lump of carbon-fibre-clad excess that’ll break the UK motorway speed limit in two and a half seconds, with depths of performance inaccessible on the public road. It’s a folly, a fiction, existing at a permanent mismatch with the world in which it operates. It is, in other words, a modern supercar.

But Ferrari – with saintly Enzo as its lodestar – loves to boil down supercars to pure objects of engineering: the lateral grip, the downforce, the Maranello lap times.

And sure, humans are drawn to supercars for their speed and groundbreaking technological developments. But also for a whole bunch of other, perhaps grubbier reasons: reasons of ego and excess and having an expensive shiny noisy thing no one else has.

Supercars, in short, are a little silly. True, the first rule of making expensive exotic absurd things is that you must insist that they are not absurd. A three-star Michelin restaurant is unlikely to concede that their 16-course tasting menu is an elaborate excuse to charge £400 for dinner..

But here’s the thing. Enzo did get the absurdity. Enzo did not see his company’s road-going supercars as a simple quest for engineering virtue. He understood his customers bought his cars for all sorts of reasons, some of which didn’t reflect hugely well on those customers.

One obituary noted Enzo “disliking intensely that the majority were ordered by rich dilettantes, people attracted by the kudos of the name, probably incapable of driving a Ferrari properly”.

To my disappointment, I am not a rich dilettante. But I am probably incapable of driving a Ferrari properly. A 1,000bhp Ferrari on the public road, at least. But driving the 849 Spider is an awesome experience precisely because it’s absurd and nonsensical and a bit wrong.

If Ferrari wants us to believe that Enzo’s spirit flows unbroken through the 849, doesn’t it flatten that experience if the big boss is repainted as some spanner-wielding medieval saint? It wouldn’t have impressed Enzo himself, that’s for sure.

It’s the twenty-first century. We can handle complicated protagonists: arguably prefer them, especially if they’re responsible for complicated creations. Saints are boring. Humans are interesting. Supercars are interesting for the same reason. Embrace the chaos.