Ferrari Make Overview

One of the world's most recognizable and revered automakers, Ferrari can best be understood by three distinctive colors tied closely to the company's history. Ferrari Red, which has long been the exterior color of choice for Ferrari's racing-inspired cars, has its roots in motor sports history, since in the early days of international racing competitions, red was the exterior color assigned to Italian-made cars. (Green was for British-made cars, blue for French cars, white or silver for German cars, and so forth.) For more than 60 years, Ferrari was, and remains, an automaker driven by motor sports, and much of the technology developed for racing has found its way into Ferrari's street-legal cars, so red serves as a visual reminder of the automaker's racing roots.

Canary yellow and black, the other two colors with which Ferrari has become associated, appear in Ferrari's Prancing Horse emblem. Enzo Ferrari, the company's founder, adopted the prancing horse as his company's logo in 1923 at the behest of an Italian countess, whose son had been an aviator in World War I and used a similar image on his planes. To honor the fallen aviator, Ferrari agreed to use the emblem, settling on a black horse on a background of canary yellow, which was the symbolic color of Modena, Italy, Ferrari's place of birth. The company still maintains its headquarters in Modena, as well as in nearby Maranello, Italy.

Born in 1898, Enzo Ferrari spent his early years as a race car driver for Alfa Romeo, an Italian automaker. In 1929, he founded Scuderia Ferrari (literally "stable Ferrari" or "team Ferrari") and started building his own race cars. After being forced to switch gears somewhat during World War II, he founded Ferrari S.p.A. in 1947 and began to produce street-legal cars, primarily as a way to finance his motor sports operations. Throughout his life, Ferrari continued to create highly coveted racing-oriented cars for consumers, though his heart and interests remained in motor sports.

Ferrari's first car, which debuted in 1947, was the V12-powered 125 S roadster, which won the Grand Prix of Rome in 1947, and continued to win races through 1950. Other significant Ferraris produced over the years include the Ferrari 250 series of the 1950s and '60s, the Superamerica and Superfast series from the same era, the 250 GTO from the early 1960s, the 275 GTB and GTS from the mid-1960s, the 206 and 246 Dinos from the late '60s into the early '70s, the Testarossa, 512TR, F40, and F50 from the 1980s, and the Enzo, produced in very limited numbers from 2002 to 2005.

Current production cars include the V8-powered F430 and F430 Spider, the V12-powered 599 GTB (Gran Turismo Berlinetta) Fiorano, and the four-passenger 612 Scaglietti sport coupe. In the racing world, Ferrari has been a mainstay of the Formula One circuit since the event's founding in the 1950s, and as of 2007 had won 15 World Drivers' and 15 World Constructors' championship titles, further fueling the desire for Ferrari's road cars. Today, new Ferrari models are unveiled in ceremonies that resemble events for royalty or the world's top movie stars, and many of the automaker's classic cars now fetch well into seven figures at prestigious auto auctions.