The president pushed his pasta around his plate with a distracted stare as he thought the unthinkable. On one wall, a picture of Michael Schumacher punching the air in jubilation at yet another victory for the most famous and successful team in Formula One; outside, the rasp of an engine screaming for mercy rattled the cutlery as a heavily disguised Ferrari of the future was thrashed around the Fiorano test track.

This is the world of the Marquis Luca Cordero di Montezemolo. Enzo Ferrari founded arguably the most evocative motoring brand in the world, but Di Montezemolo is the man who kept it alive and then restored it to a glory that even the founder could not have imagined.

He turned accounts soaked in red ink into models of financial success; put an end to cars that looked as though they were held together with Blu-Tack to institute huge reforms in quality; and he developed a complete range of cars, not just rear-engined two-seaters but front-engined grand tourers and cars with four seats. Not least, he turned a shambolic Formula One team that had been unable to win a title for 21 years into the most successful ever in grand-prix racing, with five consecutive constructors’ championships and four drivers’ titles in a row for Schumacher.

The factory that was a ramshackle cluster of ochre buildings on the outskirts of Maranello is now a gleaming testament to Di Montezemolo’s transformation. Cars are not screwed together in sheds any longer, they are engineered in glass and steel temples, the result of a £100 million investment over the past five years. Ferrari is now Ferrari Group, including Maserati, another historic but moribund name revived by the magic of Di Montezemolo. From turning out a few hundred cars a year, Maserati will soon be making 10,000 with the glorious Quattroporte saloon — a worthy rival for the Mercedes S-class and the BMW 7-series — due here next year.

There has been so much achieved since he walked back through the doors of Maranello as president exactly 12 years ago. As we lunched together this week at the test track, opposite the cottage where Enzo Ferrari would hatch his plans while listening to his Formula One cars being tested, the president wondered aloud whether there was anything left he could do.

In Italy, such an idea is unthinkable, for Ferrari is the embodiment of the nation, a sort of motoring royalty with Maranello as Buckingham Palace, attracting thousands of sightseers and enthusiasts from all over the world, with Di Montezemolo on the throne.

He has been offered jobs in government and discreetly approached by other huge companies — and turned them all down because he could not leave his first love, the business he joined as a young lawyer to be assistant to the founder 30 years ago.

He was given the race team to oversee and delivered two championships for Niki Lauda before running Fiat’s publishing empire and then heading Italia 90, one of the most successful football World Cups. But Ferrari always tugged at his sleeve and he was called back as president to save the company.

Now at 56 and with a new wife and young family, he wonders whether there can be life without Ferrari. “Maybe it is time to stop,” he said. “Maybe it is time to retire. Maybe it is time to do something else. I am thinking deeply about it more and more. There are so many things . . .”

The most cynical analysis must be that the only way now for Ferrari, the carmaker, and Ferrari, the Formula One team, is down. The race team, with Schumacher at its heart and Jean Todt, the sporting director, leading the genius of Ross Brawn, its English technical director, and Rory Byrne, the designer, will surely be impossible to replace, no matter how many of the brightest graduates Ferrari siphons off from Italy’s universities and how much money they spend on racing drivers.

More to the point, who could replace Di Montezemolo, one of the most charismatic business leaders of his generation? Ferrari is now structured as an orchestra with Di Montezemolo as the conductor instead of the one-man band of 1991 when he returned three tortured years after the death of the founder. Now Ferrari functions as a company that should withstand economic batterings, its products spread across the spectrum of demand and underpinned by a decade of steady profits.

If he should decide finally to leave a company that has claimed the best years of his business life, Ferrari should survive, unlike those years after the death of Enzo when the company was a shapeless mess of political infighting without its father figure.

But will Di Montezemolo ever be able to leave? Days without pride in a new model, such as the glorious 612 Scaglietti, or Sundays, when he doesn’t have to hide in the kitchen because he is worried whether his race team will create yet more Formula One history, will be gone. That is, surely, the unthinkable thought.

Source: The Times