The whole title is Enzo Ferrari - The Man, the Cars, the Races. This is a big book about a big figure in history and must've been a mammoth undertaking to research. I think its a well researched book and Yates has talked to as many people as will talk to him about the subject. I remember when the book came out, Yates was raked across the coals for some of his conclusions, which came across as sacrilegious in places. He made it a point to explain some of his text with a letter to Cavallino (issue 72, p. 4+8), that clarified his role as an objective journalist, not a cheerleader.
In the foreword of his book he offers "The resulting picture may offend many of his followers who have come to believe that he was a demigod..." The offense of the book is in Yates' projecting an agenda, sometimes rudely, of an opinion he either started with or developed along the way while compiling information in the book. The agenda seems to be three fold.
One is that most of Ferrari's victories came in the wake of substandard competition, that when faced with first class opposition, he faltered. You win some you loose some, that's sort of the way racing is. But see if this sounds biased, "Ferrari also developed the little 312PBs with 3-liter flat-12s in the early 60s. But by then he was on the verge of leaving sports car competition for good. Had he chosen to stay he would have faced enormous challenges from Porsche and the French areospace firm of Matra." First off, the 312PBs were in the early 70s and second, he completely ignores the fact they went practically undefeated and typically took the first three to five places all year long. This omission had to be intentional considering the comprehensive scope of his research.
The second agenda drives home the notion that Ferrari, the man and/or the company, never invented anything. He writes factually about the evolution of tried and true principles and Ferrari's reluctance to incorporate unproven technology. This is all pretty well known, like the fact that Disney never drew his characters but relied on a crack creative team around him. I think someone took offense to Yates position here, and Ferrari: 50 Years of Innovations in Technology was published in 1997. This book went a bit far the other way but it presents a pretty good case that Ferrari did put a few new cards on the table. But Yates obsessing on the subject is not good journalism. I just turned to a random page here, and he talks about the 250GTO "...when it was introduced on that chill day in 1962, its purpose was simply to win the new Grand Touring Championship and to dispose of the upstart Cobras in the process." This seems like a fair enough introduction to a car that became legend, but he continues, "This it would do in the near term, but by 1964 the lovely coupes from California, in the hands of experts like Dan Gurney, were considerably faster and more than capable of wresting the championship away from the red machines". In the space between sentences he ignores two years of Cobra's development and the FIAs denial of Ferrari's evolution of the GTO. He subsequently claims the GTO's success is based on a lack of competition, which was the same Cobra he is praises in the previous sentence. I just don't like this kind of confusing and weird partiality.
The third thing is that there are times when Yates is just rude. He proposes that Enzo's wife Laura may have been a prostitute, and that syphilis may have been present in the family germ pool. This is all well and good, but he calls Laura a whore on more than one occasion. I'm not sure that, given the same information about Ford or Duesenberg's wife he would have used such harsh terms. This is just disrespectful of Ferrari and makes me believe that Yates is not an unbiased reporter but a guy with an axe to grind.
It's a dark cover on this dark portrait. I'm not apt to recommend this book, especially in light of an excellent volume by Richard Williams that is now available.
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