The Ferrari Renaissance PDF Newsletter

Montezemolo’s determination to run the team as a business also led him to bring in bright young talent with commercial expertise to integrate the race team with the overall Ferrari business strategy. This influenced many factors including the way that the team managed sponsors, partners, and the media, and in the way that the race team was linked to the strategy of the sports car business. Sponsors influence many non-technical decisions in F1 such as the color scheme, driver and team clothing, the design of the motorhome, support vehicles, and pit backdrop.

They can also influence driver choices to appeal to their image (eg. Eddie Irvine) or to particular markets such as South America (eg. Rubens Barrichello). Consumer brands such as Marlboro or Vodaphone benefit from TV exposure, while other corporate sponsors are looking for B2B opportunities with other guests in the paddock. Looking after the sponsors’ VIP guests at races, test days, and promotional events also requires careful orchestration. For example, on race weekends, drivers days are split into 15 minute intervals that must move like clockwork in order to keep everyone happy. Starting from a history of no commercial sponsorship, Ferrari has built one of F1s top sponsorship units, charged with acquiring and retaining sponsors, managing sponsor involvement in team decisions, and making certain that sponsors get real value from their investment. Another innovation was Marlboro’s creation of a media unit for the team.

Ferrari was always popular with the media, but journalists often had to wait around the paddock in hopes of interviewing one of the drivers or team leaders. Once the media unit was created, journalists could depend on a press release each morning, a lunch for the media at noon, an interview with the drivers at 3PM, and a good espresso all day long in the atmosphere of an Italian bar. Results alone were no longer enough. The Ferrari mystique required that the results be packaged with an exclusive Italian spirit in an international atmosphere The F1 team has also served as the dynamic core of Ferrari, designed to help revitalize the road car business. Since the early 1990s when Ferrari was struggling to break even, production technology, design philosophy, and manufacturing processes were all changed in order to enhance Ferrari’s position in the luxury sports car market. These changes have resulted in dramatic increases in sales and profitability (Exhibit 6).

Part of this strategy was to bring some of the technology of F1 into Ferrari’s road cars. “We made a big effort to show the innovative technology we put in our cars: we were the first to introduce a F1 gearbox in a commercial car; the first to apply the aerodynamic approach used in F1; the first to build an all-carbon fiber composite car like in F1.” By 2002, there was a two-year waiting list to buy Ferrari road cars. When the new half-million dollar Ferrari Enzo was introduced, the entire production of 399 cars was sold out before production began.

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