Enrico Brizzi Emilia Romagna and Ferrari. The legendary link with the Red

“Give a child a piece of paper and colored pencils, then tell him to draw a racing car”, Enzo Ferrari used to say. “It will almost certainly color it red.” In Emilia-Romagna, where the myth has its roots, no child would have doubts about the color to use, but even before coloring the livery of the racing car he would instinctively draw a shield to be dyed bright yellow, embellished with the profile of a horse rampant color of the night. Here, in fact, the legend of the Reds of Maranello is an integral part of the collective imagination, universal passion, secular religion, and their victories are considered to be like holidays. It must not be a coincidence that precisely in the only Italian region that takes its name from a road, the passion for the roar of engines beats stronger. Since the first competitions held in the “strip of fat land lying between the river and the mountain” – the definition is by Giovannino Guareschi, Enzo Ferrari’s favorite writer – his people fell madly in love with the speed, technique and style that hovered around the racing world. It was the early 1900s when little Enzo and his brother Dino were led by his father Alfredo, one of the first car owners in his native Modena, to attend a pioneering race on the city circuit of nearby Bologna. For the future “Engineer” was the first spark of a passion that would have accompanied him throughout his life, escorting him towards excellence and putting his other youthful loves, opera and journalism in the background, a field in which he had made his debut at the age of sixteen, signing the Modena-Inter football report for Gazzetta dello Sport. Net of that exploit on the Rosea, the beginnings of the young Enzo were not easy. Having lost his father and brother in the years of the Great War, who himself escaped a via crucis among the hospital wards destined for the “incurable”, he had to fend for himself to enter the world of motoring through the back door. His first job was to drive disused military trucks between the Turin plant, where they had been reduced to simple chassis with wheels and engine, and the Milanese body shop where they were given back to new life in the form of cars. He became, in a short time, first a test driver, then a driver for small stables. The racing world, at the time, was divided into two categories: the gentlemen drivers who had money to spend in competitions, and those who, like him, drove to put it together. His talent was not lacking, so close to the age of twenty-five he was hired by the prestigious Alfa-Romeo racing team alongside three champions such as Ugo Sivocci, Antonio Ascari and Giuseppe Campari, known as “el négher”. Those were the years in which he needed the courage of lions both on the track and along the road routes, mostly dirt roads, as accidents were frequent and often fatal. Of the “Four Musketeers”, Enzo remained the least titled, but he too was the only one to survive the competitive activity. On the occasion of one of his rare victories, on the Ravenna circuit of Savio, he received from the parents of the ace of the air Francesco Baracca the encouragement to use as his personal coat of arms the prancing horse that had decorated his son’s aircraft; six years later he made it the emblem of his own stable. He still couldn’t know that he would turn into an authentic symbol of his homeland.