"marshknute" (marshknute)
05/18/2020 at 13:36 • Filed to: None
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"marshknute" (marshknute)
05/18/2020 at 13:36 • Filed to: None | 2
| 21 |
Ferrari always debuts their new cars in red...at least I thought they did. Turns out, quite a few recent models debuted in alternate colors. It’s a bit difficult researching this before the 2000's since there are no internet articles to mark each new debut, but here’s what I’ve dug up:
As best I can tell, the first non-red Ferrari debut was the F60 America. It debuted in blue in 2014. But considering this is a limited production variant of the F12 and the red/white/blue motif paid homage to the Superamerica name, I’m not comfortable labeling this as the first non-red Ferrari.
I think that title goes to the 458 Speciale Aperta, which debuted in 2015 in yellow with blue/white stripes. A year later, the 488 Spider debuted in blue, followed a month later by a yellow F12 tdf. The LaFerrari Aperta debuted in black with red pinstriping, both the GTC4 Lusso and Roma debuted in silver, and the 812 GTS debuted in gray. Which means the majority of modern Ferrari’s didn’t debut in red!
Another tricky pair are the Spider variants of the 360 and F430. Both debuted in red at the Geneva Auto Show, but the press photos of the 360 Spider feature yellow and silver cars, while the F430 press photos show yellow and gray. So I’m not really sure how to classify these two.
Can anyone think of an older Ferrari that debuted in an alternate color? Time to bust open those old MotorTrend magazines!
Thomas Donohue
> marshknute
05/18/2020 at 13:43 |
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I wouldn’t call it a production car, but the Monza SP1 and SP2 were released in two non-red colors....
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Thomas Donohue
> Thomas Donohue
05/18/2020 at 13:45 |
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I believe this was the actual debut, not 100% certain....
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marshknute
> Thomas Donohue
05/18/2020 at 13:55 |
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Yup, you’re right, they debuted it in that silver/yellow liv ery as a tribute to the 250 GTO !
RallyWrench
> marshknute
05/18/2020 at 14:07 |
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If I’m not mistaken, the original 400 Superamerica was debuted and shown in more than one shade of Not Red.
SBA Thanks You For All The Fish
> marshknute
05/18/2020 at 14:22 |
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It is ironic, as Enzo himself had little time for the communists that infested post-war Italia. He only wanted to build and race cars, not indulge in politics.
“Enzo Ferrari “
from our correspondent MICHELE SMARGIASSI
MODENA - The life of the not yet Prancing Horse is hanging by a thread. The man who can cut it, an irony of history, is a doctor: but in the study of Enzo Ferrari, in the Modenese stable in Via Trento and Trieste, this October morning of 1944, he appears as the “Altavilla” partisan. Officially he came only to ask him for money: “Contribution to the liberation struggle”. In reality it is there to study it, to judge it, and to pronounce a sentence. Ferrari does not know, but he is condemned to death. The Gap want to do it out for collaboration with the Germans. But that “too grown up, lanky and shabby youngster” who will become the Drake, somehow understood it anyway. It could humiliate itself, or try to buy life. Instead it cuts short: “I do not mind for myself but for the work that remains to be done”. A few minutes later, the partisan Altavilla pedaled towards his secret hiding place; on the barrel, tied with string, a parcel with 500 thousand-pound notes. A small fortune, something like a billion today.
Altavilla will tell the Gap: “That man needs us more alive than dead”. But first he said to himself: “This man has a dream to fulfill, we can not cripple the Cavallino”. The unpublished story that comes from the diary of the partisan Giuseppe Zanarini, recovered six years after his death and published by a young Modenese reporter that coincides is also called Ferrari, Stefano (the book: “Ricordando Altavilla”) is as compelling as a novel. . But also uncomfortable like the bed of a fakir for Modena, who at his Ferrari dedicates unceasingly beautiful exhibitions and ugly monuments, but who can not stand shadows on the myth.
And the question “Ferrari, which side was it?” he has only embarrassed answers. “That diary is false, however exaggerated”, “No, it’s all very true”: a review was enough in the Gazzetta di Modena to put ex partisans against former partisans; and to reopen an issue that the post-war red Modena had tried to embalm in a picture of democratic oleography: Ferrari friend of the first Communist mayor Corassori, Ferrari who helps the dismissed workers, Ferrari national-popular hero. To which the malevolent counterpoint the Ferrari that rides Mussolini sull’Appennino, who was photographed among the hierarchy, from Arpinati to Balbo, and above all the Ferrari entrepreneur who, like many colleagues, made war profits by manufacturing also components for crawlers. Obscuring both, Ferrari is neither fascist nor communist but only a Ferrari, a lover of every engine, an estimator of a few men, contemptuous of all ideologies.
The story only says that in 1943, the Commendatore is already a legend. Even if the “reds” will be born only in ‘47, on the Alfa Romeo of the Modenese team, Nuvolari is already looking at the world. But it is not just the poetry of the engines. In 1943 Ferrari opened the Maranello factory and tripled the workers. A “master”, like all colleagues subjected to the partisan tax. In Modena, the tax collector is Giuseppe Zanarini, formerly a physician of San Cesario, a cultured communist, degraded to that task “delicate and repellent” due to political restlessness. Enzo Ferrari also pays regularly. But one day his bill becomes very heavy, no longer payable in cash. And here we must trust the diary of “Altavilla”, written many years later, in Africa, where Zanarini had escaped after breaking up with the “impregnable” PCI.
Everything really looks like a novel: starting with the Gap boy who “came out of the fog, on a bicycle, and told me: Ferrari was eliminated, but before proceeding we need your judgment. in three days”. For Zanarini it is like “going out of history”: images of executioners and victims of the revolution, Robespierre, Danton. He knows that Ferrari is not without stain: “He had to deal with a reality that required to come to terms with Nazis and black brigades”. He decides: “I will judge only the man”.
That morning Ferrari received him in the stable. He is pale, tired. He has just reached the news of the death of his friend Edoardo Weber, a Bolognese carburetor industrialist executed in the street by the Gap for his German origins and his sympathies. “That death was an announcement of death for him,” Zanarini notes sharply. Yes, Ferrari has already understood everything. He looks at his interlocutor in the eye, and speaks to him as he speaks a condananto on the gallows: “I struggled to pursue a dream born in my father’s workshop, when I was a boy, I learned tenacity from him ...”.
Altavilla is shaken: he has read the classic tragedies, he knows how to measure the stature of a character. “This man is terribly fond of his idea as a builder, and his fascism is only this love”. Look for a way out. He finds it: “Once again I said to myself: argent fait la guerre”. Brutally, he asks for 500 thousand lire. Ferrari does not bat an eyelid: “Leave me twelve days”. It’s over. “The sword of Damocles moves away”. Ferrari will pay, when it dies: but life is saved. The sentence of acquittal that Altavilla makes to the Gap together with money is thin: “He is a worker very busy in his business”, he is not an enemy. The file is closed.
“Inverosimile ...”. Director of the Historical Institute of Resistance, author of a monumental monograph on Liberation in Modena, Claudio Silingardi is perplexed. “No one was interested in executing Ferrari, who in the autumn of 1944 was already cooperating intensively with ClN.In his house was hidden the secret archive of the PCI. And when it was a matter of rescuing the double-domestià podesta that helped the partisans, was Ferrari to take him away with his car “. Remember a dead man on a dead man. Witnesses, few. The eighty-year-old lawyer Nino Nava, who represented Justice and Freedom in the Modenese cln, shakes his head: “Ferrari was not nice to me, it financed both the republics and the partisans, but we did not issue sentences”.
And the Gap? He smiles: “The Gap, not even Togliatti knew what they did”. Mist, therefore, like the one from which the mysterious messenger of death on a bicycle appeared. In his memoirs, Ferrari does not mention the episode. But Stefano Ferrari has an ace up his sleeve to claim the good faith of his hero: “Here is a letter from the Drake to Zanarini”. Between the two, cemented by that “terrible ‘44", an intense friendship was born. In 1987 the former partisan sends his draft diary to the man who saved from the gallows and who in the meantime has become a world celebrity, and Ferrari replies in his purple ink: “I knew quite a few things, others I learned surprising “. Enigmatic, but it is not a denial. “Zanarini was a limpid man”, a friend and partner, Bertino Zanoli, defends him “The truth is that they censored him, I gave the diary to the Anpi years ago, but they kept it in a drawer. The polemics between partisans do not weaken with age, and the “Ferrari case” risks rekindling enmities and jealousies.
Credit to: https://www.repubblica.it/online/cronaca/ferrari/diario/diario.html
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Thomas Donohue
> marshknute
05/18/2020 at 14:38 |
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I thi nk many of the ‘GT’ cars were released in non-red..... 400 , 612 Scaggy (Blue)
Arch Duke Maxyenko, Shit Talk Extraordinaire
> marshknute
05/18/2020 at 14:44 |
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356 GT 4+2
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Thomas Donohue
> Thomas Donohue
05/18/2020 at 15:13 |
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Maybe wrong on the 612....lots of press releases show blue but this looks like a pic from 2004 auto show. More maroon than red, but....
Nom De Plume
> SBA Thanks You For All The Fish
05/18/2020 at 15:19 |
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Thank you for the only politically motivated post I willingly read on this site. Adding historically prominent texture to a post on vintage cars made for a great read.
Bravissimo!
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Thomas Donohue
> Arch Duke Maxyenko, Shit Talk Extraordinaire
05/18/2020 at 15:21 |
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C heck out this 1972 factory shot.....I only see one red hood out of a dozen or so different cars.
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Thomas Donohue
> Thomas Donohue
05/18/2020 at 15:22 |
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other angle
A Boy and His Longtail
> marshknute
05/18/2020 at 15:26 |
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Is it legal to debut a Ferrari in a color other than red? That feels like a crime or sin or something.
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marshknute
> Thomas Donohue
05/18/2020 at 15:35 |
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I’m seeing a recurring trend with many early/mid 2000's Ferrari’s in which the press cars had different colors from the models shown in the press photographs. So in your case, MotorTrend published a blue 612, but the auto shows all featured a red one.
I find it most surprising that the F12 tdf didn’t debut in red. All the performance variants get released in red (430 Scuderia, 599 GTO, 458 Speciale, LaFerrari, etc) unless they’re the convertible version, but for some reason Ferrari changed their tune on the tdf.
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SBA Thanks You For All The Fish
> Nom De Plume
05/18/2020 at 15:59 |
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Thanks. I was going to apologize— that one got out of control, actually. It started as a “isn’t it ironic the most early Ferrari were red, but Enzo Ferrari was most definitely NOT a red”.
But that story of him fighting to keep his business going, even as the Fascists were beaten but the communists were rising, is too good to resist.
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EL_ULY
> marshknute
05/18/2020 at 16:31 |
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I think my parts catalog has the press photos:
QCGoose
> marshknute
05/18/2020 at 18:33 |
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IIRC, the 456GT debuted in a nice, darker blue. I ’d post a pic, but Kinja is being Kinja.
Nauraushaun
> Thomas Donohue
05/18/2020 at 18:50 |
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Surely the 456! You Google it and you barely get any red ones, and I’d say it doesn’t really belong in red.
There’s a red one on Wikipedia though that looks pretty nice.
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Nom De Plume
> SBA Thanks You For All The Fish
05/18/2020 at 20:18 |
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You might enjoy this channel which has posted at least three Ferrari museum tour live streams in the last few days as part of the Motor Valley Festival that was conducted online this May 14-17. Only the last one is transcribed in English but YT can do subtitles.
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marshknute
> QCGoose
05/18/2020 at 20:44 |
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I wonder if it’s this one on display in the Ferrari Museum in Maranello?!?
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QCGoose
> marshknute
05/18/2020 at 21:44 |
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Sure looks like it. Man that's a beauty
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marshknute
> EL_ULY
05/19/2020 at 08:37 |
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Now that is the kind of handy-dandy graphic I’ve been looking for! Thanks for that!!!