Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, Ferrari’s president, is pleading with Formula One to go easy on cost-cutting measures
I invited you here,” Luca Cordero di Montezemolo said, tapping his water glass with a fork and quietening the dozen journalists seated around the table at the Scuderia Ferrari’s headquarters, “because I have decided to form my own political party.”
There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Montezemolo’s sober expression cracked, and the laughter began. The president of Ferrari had been winding us up, in response to a report a week or so earlier that he was planning to make his long rumoured entry into Italian politics, to stand directly against Silvio Berlusconi.
A couple of hours later, as the lunch broke up, he remarked that it would be a pointless exercise, by which he meant that Berlusconi is effectively immovable. Probably no other living Italian, however, would stand as good a chance of unseating the country’s controversial prime minister.
Montezemolo had studied law in New York and driven rally cars before, in 1973, being recruited by Enzo Ferrari to turn around the fortunes of the celebrated but ailing Formula One team. He was 25 at the time. In partnership with the equally young and ambitious Niki Lauda, he breathed life back into the Scuderia. He did the same in 1991, when he returned as president of a company floundering in the wake of the founder’s death.
In between times he managed Italy’s first America’s Cup campaign, ran the 1990 World Cup organising committee, occupied several senior posts in the Fiat empire before becoming its chairman, and served as president of the confederation of Italian industries. A serious man, then, as well as a charismatic figure whose arrival in the grand prix paddock invariably provokes a flutter among the paparazzi.
Last week’s lunch at Fiorano, the test track located across the road from the Maranello factory, continued a tradition begun by Enzo Ferrari, at which the past year is assessed and the future examined. As he swept aside the disappointment of Abu Dhabi, where Fernando Alonso failed to clinch the title in his first season with the team, high on Montezemolo’s agenda was a plea to the governing body to go easy on the sort of cost-cutting measures introduced in the latter days of Max Mosley’s reign.
“I’m in favour of cutting costs, but there has to be a limit,” he said. “Look at the really successful football clubs – Internazionale, Chelsea, Real Madrid. If you want to compete at the top level in sport, you have to spend money.” He does not feel that this year’s new teams, operating on tiny budgets and three seconds a lap slower than the established outfits, are adding lustre to grand prix racing.
Nor is he keen on Formula One’s projected switch in 2013 to a turbocharged 1.5-litre four-cylinder engine, not least because all current production Ferraris have engines with eight or 12 cylinders. (He seemed to have forgotten that Alberto Ascari won the Scuderia’s first two world titles, in 1952 and 1953, with a four-cylinder car.)
But Ferrari’s perspective is somewhat different from that of the majority of their competitors. They are the only team still active in 2010 to have competed in the first world championship season in 1950, and their aura is vital to the image of grand prix racing. The company is also unique in that its parallel businesses of running a racing team and building 6,000 road cars a year are interdependent: the reputation of one fuels the profits of the other, and vice versa. So Montezemolo’s words tend to carry extra weight.
His argument against austerity included a request to the rule-makers to reconsider the stringent restrictions on track testing. Outside, in the bright winter sunlight, the tight little circuit – created by Enzo Ferrari as a tool to help his engineers develop the cars – lay deserted, silenced by the regulations.
I thought back to another sunlit winter afternoon at Fiorano, on which the Scuderia launched a new car for the 1996 season. As the light started to fade, Michael Schumacher took the scarlet machine out for a handful of exploratory laps. Hearing the scream of the racing engine, workers on their way home from the local ceramic factories parked their cars and got out to watch in the gathering dusk: a precious tradition, much missed.
Espanyol in fanfare to Iniesta’s heartfelt gesture
When Andres Iniesta scored the only goal of the match to win the World Cup for Spain last July, he stripped off his jersey to show the global audience a T-shirt bearing the message “Dani Jarque – always with us”. It was a salute to the captain of Espanyol, who had died of a heart attack in October 2009, aged 26.
As he paid tribute to his friend, Iniesta was probably not expecting any sort of reward. He got it on Saturday evening, however, when Barcelona made the short journey to Espanyol’s new stadium. The home crowd’s hostility to their local rivals, exacerbated by a 5-1 defeat, was interrupted just once. When Iniesta was withdrawn in his second half, they rose as one to applaud him, many of them raising placards expressing their gratitude for his gesture in the summer. The players of Espanyol joined in, too. It was a moment of grace to drive away the bad smells currently being generated by big-time football.
Prune time television
An historic wrong was righted on Sunday when AP McCoy became the first jockey to win the BBC’s sports personality of the year award. But it may now be time to reverse the galloping grandiosity of a show that has grown too big, too loud, and too stupid. Curbing the producers’ compulsion to mimic the garish drama of The X Factor would probably save enough money to fund the government’s endangered school sports programme. An austerity drive could start by eliminating the dry ice, two of the three presenters and the decorative but pointless Katherine Jenkins.
Desperate housewives
The wives and girlfriends of the England cricket team were ordered to stay away from the first two Test matches of the current Ashes series. Result: a draw in Brisbane and a resounding win in Adelaide. They were flown in ahead of the Third Test in Perth. Result: a couple of batting collapses leading to a demoralising defeat. Any temptation to start drawing conclusions should, of course, be firmly resisted.