Enzo Ferrari (Movie Tie-in Edition)

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The autoroute to Beaune lay ahead, an inkblot of asphalt. Behind him a few remaining lights of Lyon flickered in the rearview mirror as the big Renault sedan settled into a steady lope at 125 mph. He would be in Paris before dawn.

He was a driver. At eighty-­two years, he still handled an automobile with the same authority and resolve that had carried him to three victories at Le Mans. Twenty-­four hours. Around the clock. Those races were his specialties. He had never been a sprinter, never particularly fast in the twitchy, pitiless single-­seat Grand Prix machines. But give him a full-­fendered Alfa Romeo or Ferrari sports car and he could run like a marathoner, hour after hour, kilometer banked on kilometer, crushing the opposition with his sheer grit and the reserves of muscle coiled in his compact bricklayer s body.

He checked his watch. The hands were slipping toward three o clock on the morning of August 14, 1988. It was a drive he had made a hundred times: Modena to Paris, now a headlong rush along the table-­smooth Italian autostradas and the French autoroutes. For forty years, the mission had been the same. The central theme had been the cars, those low-­slung beasts that had caused him so much joy and grief. Up and down the autoroutes, crossing and recrossing the spine of the Alps like some crazed tourist, back and forth over the bleak expanse of the Atlantic, always with one singular purpose ­the glorification and enrichment of the most supremely outrageous, overpowered and oversexed automobiles of the modern era, the crimson bolides of Modena and Maranello ­the magic machines of Enzo Ferrari.

Ferrari. There had been times, often lasting months, even years, when he wished he had never heard the name, but too much time had passed for that. Seventy years, he mused. He had known this incredible man since 1918, when both had been young veterans poking around the postwar automobile business in Milan and Turin. Ferrari had

Brock Yates (1933–2016) was an American television and print journalist, screenwriter, and bestselling author. He was the longtime executive editor of Car and Driver magazine. He was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame in America in 2017.

Captivating . . . Yates deftly records the carnage of major races, business wheeling and dealing, and the political dimensions of motor racing from the pre-WWII Rome-Berlin Axis to today s ribbon-waving nationalism. Publishers Weekly