Where would we be without Ferrari?

Stefano Domenicali was troubled. The Ferrari team's magnificent triumph in Malaysia had been, he knew, entirely due to the ingenuity of his number one driver, Fernando Alonso, and not, as required by his team boss's contract at Ferrari, a triumph for the entire Ferrari team, guided by him. The Press had applauded Alonso’s performance but had not spared any kind words for Ferrari, or indeed for Domenicali himself.

Domenicali decided to take a day off and do some thinking. Like many men before him, Domenicali had always found that he did his best thinking in Paris. It was in this city that he found himself sipping a cafe au lait that morning, having checked into a hotel in the Quartier Latin on the previous evening. As the Parisian Spring sunshine bathed his face he recalled Ferrari triumphs from the past. A smile crept across his cheeks at the memory of overhearing an English boy speaking to his father at Silverstone as they walked into the circuit.

“What colour is a Ferrari, dad?”

“Blood red, son, blood red.”

Domenicali decided to go for a walk. Almost involuntarily, he found himself inside the Louvre wandering aimlessly from gallery to gallery. The old museum had been a favourite of his since boyhood and he enjoyed a passing familiarity with many of the famous works housed there. Not being an art aficionado, he simply enjoyed the serenity of the spaces inside the museum and the beauty of some of the masterpieces was not entirely lost on him. Now, perhaps because of age, perhaps patriotism, he tended to linger longer at the works of the Old Italian Masters.

Presently, Domenicali was before the gigantic canvas, The Death of the Virgin, by the Italian Baroque genius, Michalengelo Merisi da Caravaggio. For perhaps the first time ever, Domenicali stood before the life-size altar-piece and spent a long time staring meaningfully at it.

A woman in a scarlet dress lies dead on a plank of wood with her left hand hanging limply to the side. There is no doubt that she is indeed dead: the scene is one of immeasurable desolation. The poor, humble room in which she lies is filled by a disorderly crowd of grieving people: the ones closest to the corpse are convulsed with sorrow; a man clutches at his throat; another stabs his eyes with his fists; the woman in the foreground sits closest to the body, bent and shuddering in anguished sobs. The loss they have suffered has caused the people in the picture to seem forlorn, utterly wretched and helpless.

There would have been nothing unusual about a scene like like this in the 17^th Century, when Caravaggio painted it, and there is nothing unusual about it today. Death tends to involve disorderly scenes like this one. But this is not just any dead woman; this is Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. Was she supposed to die like this? Was she supposed to die at all? If you asked most other artists of the period, the answer would have been a resounding “NO!” The Virgin, it was believed, was assumed alive and whole into the heavens, not allowed to breathe her last on a makeshift bed in a mean, disagreeable room.

The picture affected Domenicali more than it ever had. It struck him for the first time that the overwhelming colour used by Caravaggio was red. The soft light illuminating the upper body, head and hands of the Virgin was reddish in hue. Red was the colour of the dead Virgin's dress and that of the massive drapery which hung over the scene. Suddenly, Domenicali felt a pang of anguish rip through his heart. First steadying himself against a wall, he sank into the bench in the middle of the gallery and stared at the painting afresh while clutching his head with trembling hands. His breathing became quick and laboured. “Could it be,” he gasped, “that there is a reason for my presence here today? Am I to live to oversee the – dear God in heaven, please let it not be so – the death of Ferrari?”

In motor racing terms, no team could point at a heritage more purely dedicated to Formula One than Ferrari. The team's founding father, Enzo Ferrari, created a company which was concerned principally with producing racing cars, not street cars. The fans following the team worldwide had grown to such an enormous extent that at least half of those who bought tickets to attend F1 races or switched on their televisions on Sundays were Ferrari supporters. The team seemed to represent the very essence of Formula One: it was impossible to imagine a race in which mechanics wearing red overalls and fans waving red flags were absent. If a Ferrari won a race at any circuit anywhere in the world, a sea of red opened out across the various stands.

And yet, something seemed to have been lost in the recent past. The engineers were lacklustre and seemed incapable of producing a competitive car. The team’s strategists were unimaginative and wont to make unforced errors such as barking out illegal team orders, or making ill-judged calls for tyre changes. With the exception of Fernando Alonso, who, it was feared, would not hang about for much longer, the drivers had lost interest in Formula One. As the newspaper men kept writing, Ferrari had lost its mojo.

When Domenicali returned to his office at Ferrari’s headquarters in Maranello, he ordered the team into the company auditorium and, standing before them behind a lectern, gave them a speech he had prepared accompanied by visual images on a screen to his right. He spoke of the dream nurtured by Enzo Ferrari and the birth of what became Scuderia Ferrari. He described the ambition behind the men who designed the team’s test track at Fiorano and the love and dedication that went into every last millimetre of tarmac. He showed images of the Ferrari champions from Alberto Ascari to Kimi Raikkonen and explained which of each of their race wins was his favourite. He spoke with emotion about the tears wept when Niki Lauda came close to his death while trapped in a burning Ferrari after an accident at the Nürburgring. Finally, he displayed an image of Caravaggio’s The Death of the Virgin.

“If you look carefully at the picture,” said Domenicali, “ you will see that far from an image of desolation, it is one of saintliness and hope for those of us here, for round the Blessed Virgin’s head, there is a halo. Let it inspire you to rise up to the true meaning of Ferrari!”

When he had finished, everybody rose to their feet and cheered. Catholic and emotional, to a man, they wept.

We have the remainder of the season to see whether Stefano Domenicali did enough to rouse the spirits of his Italian team.

Gitau

10 April 2012

This piece is dedicated to the memory of my dear, departed friend, John Githaiga Mwaniki, a Ferrari fan. Never stinting in his praise of my work, I think he would have liked it.