Teamspeed.com - What if Ford had bought Ferrari?

Almost exactly 45 years ago this month, Henry Ford II thought he had a deal. Nine months of negotiation were over, and on July 4, 1963, Hank the Deuce was planning to be in Maranello signing a $10 million deal with Enzo Ferrari that would give Ford Motor Company a half share in the storied Italian sports-car maker. As Time reported in its May 24 issue of that year: "To mark the partnership, the two companies have already started design work on a new, prestigious 'Ferrari-Ford,' which will have a powerful 12-cylinder engine in a Ford sports chassis."

The deal never happened. The Ferrari-Ford was never built. Enzo Ferrari pulled the pin on the deal at the last minute, leaving Ford high and dry.
We all know what happened next: An enraged Henry authorized the development of the Ford GT40, with the express goal of humiliating Enzo's blood-red sports racers in the Le Mans 24 Hour race. Which it duly did, four times in a row from 1966.

Written by Angus MacKenzie of Motor Trend:
"I started thinking about this while en route to Le Mans for the 24-Hour this weekend. And then I started wondering: What if Enzo hadn't backed out of the deal? What if Ford Motor Company had ended up owning Ferrari? And the more I thought about it, the more fun I had rewriting history.

There are dozens of different scenarios that could have played out, had the deal gone through. Here are just a few:

* Bernie Ecclestone would not be running Formula 1 today.
One of Enzo Ferrari's prime motivations for seeking the Ford deal was to secure funding for his racing operations. Il Commendatore viewed his road car business almost as an afterthought -- racing was his real passion. With a vested interest in the Ferrari F1 team, Ford would have had no incentive to develop the 3.0L Cosworth DFV V-8, one of the most successful racing engines of all time. And without the Cosworth DFV, the organization Bernie Ecclestone used to ultimately gain control of F1's commercial activities, might never have come into being.

With a handful of exceptions, Grand Prix racing had always been dominated by factory-backed teams that built complete cars and used racing to promote their road car businesses. The Cosworth DFV changed all that. Developed using Ford money, and first raced in 1967, the Cosworth DFV allowed scrappy privateer British outfits like Lotus, McLaren, Williams, Tyrrell, and Brabham to compete successfully against the old-school grandee teams like Ferrari, Matra, and Alfa Romeo. The privateer team owners formed FOCA to represent their interests, and Ecclestone, then the owner of Brabham, became its chief executive -- with Max Mosley as legal advisor -- in 1978. And the rest, as they say, is history.

* There would be Prancing Horse badges on a Mustang
Though its recent record is far from stellar (how many fingers are being crossed in Dearborn right now that the Flex is, finally, truly, absolutely, The One?) Ford has had a rare talent for surfing the automotive zeitgeist -- Model T; Model A; '49 Ford; Mustang; Taurus; F-150; Explorer. But it doesn't have the faintest clue about how to manage brands. Exhibit A: Jaguar. There are dozens of examples of FoMoCo's total lack of understanding of what Jaguar was, and what it could be, but for me it's the fact it took seven years for design chief Ian Callum to get the Jaguar he wanted on the road.

Against that background, it's difficult to imagine how Ford "management" would have benefitted Ferrari. I suspect the business would have been left pretty much alone at first, largely because the folks in Dearborn would have found everything -- the language, the work practices, the food -- so alien. But eventually the beancounters and the marketing mavens would have started poking around the business. There'd have been Taurus switchgear in the Testarossa (instead of Fiat) and talk of a small Ferrari. And then one day in the 1970s, someone in a meeting room in the Glasshouse would have had a brilliant idea: "Why don't we do a Ferrari-edition Mustang? It's just like Ghia, only sporty..."

* Ferrari today would be more like Porsche
One thing Ford did right at Jaguar was improve the company's manufacturing capability. The first Ford-appointed Jaguar boss, a hard-bitten manufacturing expert called Bill Hayden, once famously compared the company's production line with a Russian tractor factory. And with some justification: A Jaguar insider once confessed to me that shortly after the Ford takeover, the Brits had sent their three best cars over to Dearborn for a quality audit. The best of the three had 10 times the defects of a Taurus.

Ferrari builds just over 5000 cars a year now; Porsche close to 50,000. Ferrari's road car production was almost a cottage industry back in 1963, and it's highly likely Ford would have quickly moved to standardize manufacturing systems and processes (Ford invented this stuff, after all) and also to increase volume, because to a company that invented mass production, Ferrari's output would have seemed too tiny and too much a waste of potential revenue. That would have eventually meant cheaper, smaller Ferraris, and, in the fullness of time, possibly even a Ferrari SUV. Don't laugh. Back in 1963 no one at Porsche figured they'd be building one, either."