Ferrari, every mention

Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team? (Audio) · Acquired Apr 14, 2026 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 1:13:41 David Rosenthal He's an employee at Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:13:49 David Rosenthal I mean, people within the company know, but it's like you don't talk about, hey, Piero is actually Enzo's son.
• ▶ 1:14:00 David Rosenthal What's gonna become of the company?
• ▶ 1:14:51 Ben Gilbert Now, over in the racing land of Ferrari, they're on a hot streak.
• ▶ 1:15:08 Ben Gilbert So, if you are interested in entering racing, either you gotta beat Ferrari, or you gotta own Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:16:08 Ben Gilbert Well, it doesn't take them long to figure out that is Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:16:22 Ben Gilbert So they make an offer to buy Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:16:59 Ben Gilbert There's a second called Ferrari Ford that's 90% owned by Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:17:42 Ben Gilbert You can imagine why this is in Ferrari's public relations interest based on everything that we've been describing about their business strategy, of course.
• ▶ 1:18:58 Ben Gilbert They actually do, after a few years, beat the Ferraris in the 1966 Le Mans race, finishing with Fords in first, second, and third.
• ▶ 1:19:16 Ben Gilbert So this is done, of course, to market the exclusivity of Ferrari and how they're the mark to beat, and it's a great tactic to sell cars, but it's also to signal that
• ▶ 1:19:39 David Rosenthal It's kind of like Enzo and Ferrari got a dual benefit out of this whole saga.
• ▶ 1:19:51 David Rosenthal Of Ferrari, of like, oh, we were going to sell to these big, ugly Americans, but they wanted to take our racing from it, and we said, no, you'll have to kill us in order to take it.
• ▶ 1:20:26 David Rosenthal Ferrari drama was going down between the years of, 1963 and call it 1966, 67.
• ▶ 1:21:38 David Rosenthal Really, at the end of the day, though, there's only one correct buyer for Ferrari, and it's Gianni Agnelli and the Fiat Empire.
• ▶ 1:21:51 David Rosenthal With Gianni to sell 50% of Ferrari to Fiat immediately there in 1969 with a secret agreement that triggered upon Enzo's death, which again he thinks is imminent, Fiat will acquire another 40%, taking their stake to 90%,
• ▶ 1:23:46 Ben Gilbert The other full circle moment is that Gianni Agnelli was one of the very first Ferrari customers.
• ▶ 1:24:09 Ben Gilbert Valuing all of Ferrari at 6.8 million.
• ▶ 1:25:29 Ben Gilbert The state of Ferrari is kind of grim at this point, too.
• ▶ 1:25:42 Ben Gilbert They were founded in 1963 specifically to challenge Ferrari, at least Lamborghini Motors, which we'll come back to.
• ▶ 1:25:54 Ben Gilbert Asking someone to take on Ferrari's operations was a tall order, in addition to needing to sell.
• ▶ 1:26:12 David Rosenthal Like, a better Ferrari than a Ferrari at the time.
• ▶ 1:26:20 David Rosenthal Fiat and Gianni Agnelli had to be the buyer to store Ferrari through this period.
• ▶ 1:26:54 David Rosenthal And in the spring of 1971, Enzo, the grand old man, is back in Marinello at the head of Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:27:06 David Rosenthal But it's a Ferrari that he barely recognizes from when he left.
• ▶ 1:27:19 David Rosenthal Who would go on to carry the legacy and the spirit of Ferrari for really the next 40 years and into the next generation and build Ferrari what it is today.
• ▶ 1:28:04 Ben Gilbert This actually reminds me of Ferrari on race day.
• ▶ 1:29:47 David Rosenthal I mean, as much as anyone in Ferrari history besides Enzo, Luca de Montezemolo is Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:30:28 David Rosenthal So Luca was born in 1947, the same year that the modern Ferrari commenced operations.
• ▶ 1:31:30 David Rosenthal I don't think I've ever seen a Ferrari rally car.
• ▶ 1:34:28 David Rosenthal This is a pretty tough time for a Ferrari here in the seventies.
• ▶ 1:36:48 David Rosenthal Oh, Luca has this great, great quote on the nature of the connection between Ferrari's performance on the track and the business selling road cars.
• ▶ 1:37:13 David Rosenthal The myth of Ferrari is based on competition on cars.
• ▶ 1:38:31 Ben Gilbert It's this farmhouse, and in this exact period, actually a couple years before, in 1972, so after the illness, but before the Niki Lauda F-One victory, they actually build a full racetrack adjacent to Ferrari's headquarters that goes around…
• ▶ 1:38:54 Ben Gilbert Testing the cars on this, I mean, truly unbelievable custom racetrack only for Ferrari's research and development.
• ▶ 1:40:22 David Rosenthal I think they truly do always kind of love and respect each other, but all of this combines Luca can't stay at Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:40:36 David Rosenthal The F-One team leaves day-to-day at Ferrari and goes to work for Fiat in Turin.
• ▶ 1:40:42 David Rosenthal He remains on the board of Ferrari, Luca does, but he goes day-to-day to Turin and kind of closer to the Anieli Empire.
• ▶ 1:41:22 Ben Gilbert Much later, and there's this glorious, amazing return of Luca, and there's this unbelievable run in Formula One, and the Ferrari road car business becomes stronger than ever, but basically none of it in...
• ▶ 1:41:36 Ben Gilbert In fact, the last 10 plus years of his life is a real whimper in the history of Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:41:57 David Rosenthal His last car, Ferrari's first official supercar, halo car.
• ▶ 1:42:03 David Rosenthal There were unofficial GTO homologation versions of race cars, and now those things sell at auction for, like, 40, fifty million or more.
• ▶ 1:43:28 Ben Gilbert And David, to your point, this thing, while it is a supercar, the same way that the F-fifty and the LaFerrari and the Enzo and the F-eighty are supercars, this is not a luxury supercar.
• ▶ 1:43:28 Ben Gilbert And David, to your point, this thing, while it is a supercar, the same way that the F-fifty and the LaFerrari and the Enzo and the F-eighty are supercars, this is not a luxury supercar.
• ▶ 1:44:24 Ben Gilbert Of the Enzo era of Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:44:34 David Rosenthal Ferrari will never make another one like it again.
• ▶ 1:44:39 David Rosenthal It was the 40th anniversary of the commencing of operations of the modern Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:45:37 David Rosenthal For the next couple of years, though, oh, man, the sort of slow motion disaster at Ferrari continues unabated on both sides of the business.
• ▶ 1:46:02 Ben Gilbert So a good friend of the show, Arvind Navaratnam from Worldly Partners, uh, scoured all of the old annual reports that he could find, and in the 1988 annual report, it reports the amount of Lira to acquire the remaining 40% of Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:47:18 David Rosenthal This really just highlights how different a company Ferrari was when Enzo died.
• ▶ 1:47:56 David Rosenthal Just as one example, Ferrari during these years before Luca comes back, Ferrari produced 7000 Testarosas over the seven years that the Testarosa was in production.
• ▶ 1:47:56 David Rosenthal Just as one example, Ferrari during these years before Luca comes back, Ferrari produced 7000 Testarosas over the seven years that the Testarosa was in production.
• ▶ 1:48:20 David Rosenthal By any normal car company, we're talking tiny numbers no matter what, but when you're talking about something rare and exclusive and so special as what a Ferrari should be, and then you have a company that you don't even really consider…
• ▶ 1:48:43 Ben Gilbert And another crazy frame on that, if you look at the production of total Ferrari cars, not just one model, but total cars, in 1982, it was 2200.
• ▶ 1:49:19 David Rosenthal Demand has evaporated so much for Ferraris that for the first time in history, cars are going unsold.
• ▶ 1:49:46 David Rosenthal We are, quote, putting Ferrari in your hands.
• ▶ 1:49:51 David Rosenthal And Luca di Montezemolo returns to become chairman of Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:50:08 David Rosenthal So at this point, when Gianni calls Luca back, he's been gone from the day-to-day at Ferrari for almost 15 years.
• ▶ 1:50:16 David Rosenthal After Ferrari, he did a short stint at Fiat, and then he stayed in the Agnelli empire.
• ▶ 1:50:32 David Rosenthal And then the reason that Luca couldn't come back to take over Ferrari as soon as Enzo died was he had become the organizer and president of the Italia 90 World Cup.
• ▶ 1:51:24 David Rosenthal So the first thing Montezemolo does when he knows he's going to return to take over Ferrari after Enzo, he goes and he buys a three 48, the flagship Ferrari sports car at the time, just to sort of see the state of things.
• ▶ 1:52:20 David Rosenthal In a Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:52:25 Ben Gilbert What, like, the Ferrari has deteriorated, it's fallen apart in this era, the, the cars have no personality, but they also have no performance, and they're impractical, and they're over making them, and no one wants them.
• ▶ 1:52:50 David Rosenthal You know, Ferrari road cars went from being the same thing, built by the same people as the racing cars, as the F-One cars and the Le Mans cars in the same factory, to in this period with Fiat control, they're really not the same thing.
• ▶ 1:53:21 David Rosenthal So at the time, the Japanese sports car industry was on the rise, and all the car enthusiasts were saying Ferrari's dead, the Italian car makers are dead, the Japanese have taken over.
• ▶ 1:53:34 David Rosenthal Luca has the test drivers at Ferrari go out and buy a Honda NSX and do like his own version of the Pepsi challenge, like
• ▶ 1:54:04 Ben Gilbert You don't hear anyone talking about Ferrari is this sort of like untouchable apex brand.
• ▶ 1:54:21 David Rosenthal But if Honda is making a better sports car than Ferrari, there's a real, real problem.
• ▶ 1:56:25 David Rosenthal We can't have a Honda NSX outclassing a Ferrari.
• ▶ 1:56:30 David Rosenthal Ferraris are about our heritage and our myth, but they are also about looking ahead.
• ▶ 1:56:39 Ben Gilbert And this is really where the feelings about technology change, where Ferrari went from a late adopter of technology when it's sort of proven to really pushing the bleeding edge and
• ▶ 1:56:50 Ben Gilbert Today, Ferrari spends a good amount more on R&D as a percentage of their revenue than most other car companies.
• ▶ 1:57:33 Ben Gilbert So modest by Ferrari's standards.
• ▶ 1:58:14 Ben Gilbert So I mentioned that in 1991, Ferrari had made 4500 cars, which is just this giant inflation.
• ▶ 1:58:49 David Rosenthal We need to not just fix the myth of Ferrari, but we need to protect it, and this was Luca's third and most important priority, the myth.
• ▶ 1:59:08 David Rosenthal Is the one who realized that Ferrari is a luxury company.
• ▶ 1:59:13 David Rosenthal To Enzo, Ferrari was a racing company that sold a connection to that to its clients, and Enzo was a marketing genius, and he came up with the prancing horse and the red and the myth of Enzo.
• ▶ 1:59:51 David Rosenthal Luca is the one who institutes custom luxury leather luggage that comes perfectly fitted to your Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:00:03 David Rosenthal At Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:00:45 Ben Gilbert The other big piece of his strategy is anytime you see a Ferrari, it needs to scream Ferrari at you.
• ▶ 2:00:55 Ben Gilbert Like all the cool classic Ferraris and the race cars, but it was much easier to drive.
• ▶ 2:01:41 Ben Gilbert I mean, Ferrari was operating in the red when he came in.
• ▶ 2:03:43 David Rosenthal Ferrari is a different thing.
• ▶ 2:04:06 David Rosenthal Ferrari clients and Ferrari collectors aren't upset by the fact that Ferrari has a couple hundred million, you know, commoner fans out there.
• ▶ 2:04:20 Ben Gilbert Ferrari is both a luxury brand and a giant international sports team.
• ▶ 2:04:41 Ben Gilbert Ferrari is Hermes and Manchester United smashed together.
• ▶ 2:05:13 Ben Gilbert Did Luca really bring Ferrari's current manufacturing to life?
• ▶ 2:05:25 David Rosenthal So he brought in great architects to redesign the factories, and this is when, if you look at video or photos of Ferrari factories today, they have trees in them.
• ▶ 2:05:41 Ben Gilbert I think my favorite thing about Ferrari is the manufacturing process, and it's both because of how cool it is
• ▶ 2:05:55 Ben Gilbert So after 1994, Ferrari does not have a stock of cars.
• ▶ 2:06:19 Ben Gilbert Every Ferrari is unique.
• ▶ 2:06:34 Ben Gilbert So Ferrari factories are vertically integrated to the nth degree.
• ▶ 2:07:03 Ben Gilbert Not Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:08:14 David Rosenthal No Ferrari shares a platform with any other car.
• ▶ 2:08:27 Ben Gilbert Not Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:08:31 David Rosenthal In the last years of Enzo and the Interregnum period when Fiat was taking control, there were some Fiat parts and switches that were making their way into Ferraris.
• ▶ 2:08:44 David Rosenthal The only things that go into Ferraris are Ferraris.
• ▶ 2:09:30 David Rosenthal Efficiency is not the point for Ferrari.
• ▶ 2:09:37 Ben Gilbert Ferrari can operate on a much shorter timescale between design and actually getting a car out to customers since there's less overhead in getting started.
• ▶ 2:09:47 Ben Gilbert You would never want to do a 100,000 cars a year with the Ferrari model.