Enzo ferrari biography book

This is the very book upon which the movie Ferrari is based. Brock Yates was one of the greatest writers in automotive journalism, and in fact wrote a couple movies himself, Cannonball Run being the most famous. He also started the Cannonball Run. Let's just say he was prolific.

Here he has focused his considerable talents on the most influential and iconoclastic character in the automotive industry, a man whose shadow extends all across racing, sports car manufacturing and what would come to be called the supercar. Yates covers Enzo's entire life, along with all the races and all his various picadillos. It's so broad a book that it's almost amusing to see that the few sections in the middle about the 1957 Mille Miglia that were chosen for the movie are only a few short pages, just as that chapter of Ferrari's life was also just a small part. But Yates' writing is so good that you will be swept along through the whole thing. It'll make you want to dig up old copies of Car and Driver just to read more.

Italian writer Luca Dal Monte was actually an employee of Ferrari for several years, as the PR guy for Ferrari North America. He refers to that time in his life as "magical." Anyone who was lucky enough to be working at a car magazine in those years (me!) benefitted from Dal Monte's creativity and enthusiasm.

This is perhaps the most thorough book about the life of this great man, Enzo Ferrari, with details and truths you won't find anywhere else. Ferrari first met his main mistress Lina Lardi in the 1920s, for instance, not in the '40s, and he remained with her the rest of his life. And Lina Lardi wasn't the only "other woman" in Enzo's life. He was, if not quite a hound dog, then certainly an enthusiastic pursuer o