On this day 35 years ago, Ferrari experienced an incredible loss when Enzo Ferrari, the man who founded Ferrari in 1947, passed away. It was his genius and expertise that brought the Ferrari brand to life, making race cars and performance cars that transformed the automotive world and set standards in design, performance, and engineering that pushed the entire industry forward into what it is today, and Ferrari continues to do so in the present day.
In fact, on the 35th anniversary of Enzo Ferrari’s passing, Ferrari celebrates the fulfillment of his final wishes and the incredible expansion and progress of Ferrari’s brand and influence since, with racing achievements, an incredible lineup of cars, and more. Enzo Ferrari passed away on August 14, 1988, and on his 90th birthday, February 18th of that year, he asked his team to trust his successors.
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Since then, Ferrari has blossomed incredibly. It’s hard to imagine a small Ferrari because its factory today is over 40 times the roughly 215,000 square-foot size it was in 1947, at an incredible total size of over 9.25 million square feet, with over 13,000 cars delivered last year. The company has also gone from employing 140 to now employing roughly 5,000, over 35 times the amount of people it originally did.
While important pieces of the Ferrari tapestry like the Fiorano Circuit, the first in-house paint shop, and more were developed under Enzo’s watch, much of the Ferrari we see today was created after his passing. Many of the brand’s facilities were penned by famous architects like Renzo Piano, Marco Visconti, and Massimiliano Fuksas who designed the Wind Tunnel, the Mechanical Machining department, and the Product Development center respectively in the late 1990s and 2000s. In newer facilities built in the 2010s, the same architectural flair is seen. While Ferrari has seen incredible growth and strength after Enzo Ferrari passed away, it was he who paved the way for it all to happen.
Sources: Ferrari
