The year is 1954 in the United States of America. The first Sports Illustrated factor was published in August. The first Burger King chain opens in Miami in December. The first successful kidney transplant is performed. Oh, and Luigi Chinetti sells the first Ferrari in the United States.
It’s the first step in a move that will turn the Italian automaker into a foreign powerhouse with a significant profit stream from the United States, and it’s also a move that will cement Luigi Chinetti’s reputation as one of the most important distributors and distributors in history. of motorsport.
Born on July 17, 1901 in Jerago con Orago, Italy, Luigi Chinetti grew up honing his mechanical skills in his gunsmith father’s paint shop. At the age of 16, he was such a talented mechanic that he began painting for the automobile manufacturer Alfa Romeo. where he met another young painter from the Italian team: Enzo Ferrari.
But Chinetti was concerned about political adjustments in Europe. During World War I he moved to Paris to sell Alfa Romeos. At the start of World War II, he joined Lucy O’Reilly Schell’s Écurie Bleue team, which traveled to the United States for the Indianapolis 500 in 1940. Chinetti and his driver René Dreyfus remained in the United States. United after the event.
In 1949, at the end of the war, Chinetti returned to Europe, where he discovered that his assets in Paris had been destroyed and the Ferrari factory had been transformed into a tool production plant.
At a meeting on Christmas Eve, Chinetti promised to buy 25 of Enzo Ferrari’s first production sports cars and sell them in Paris and the United States.
You see, Chinetti had a good eye for cars. In 1932 he won the 24 Hours of Le Mans with his co-driver Raymond Sommer. The following year, Chinetti and Louis Chiron won the 24 Hours of Spa.
And in 1949, he drove a Ferrari 166M to victory at Le Mans, racing for more than 23 hours.
Chinetti knew the car well. He also knew that after World War II, Americans had a lot of money to spend and wanted to spend it on the incredible, nimble sports cars they had fallen in love with while fighting overseas.
After selling some cars already in the running to U. S. investors like Briggs Cunningham, Chinetti is confident of success.
? The scandalous story of the boy who gave glamor to F1
? From a Mini Cooper to a Lotus 24: the first F1 experience of a Texan legend at the Nürburgring
And he is right. In the early 1950s, Chinetti became the sole importer of Ferrari in United States and in 1954 the first production model rolled out of his dealership.
Part of Chinetti’s success was his ability to market Ferrari machines as luxury products. Sure, sports cars were beautiful, but Chinetti built a mystique and a story that made them unforgettable.
“You’ve never met a guy like him,” recalls former racer and driver Bob Grossguy.
“Everyone seeks to dissect Chinetti, to perceive him. He is much smarter than we thought. He reminded me of Gucci.
“It made cars so inaccessible; He made your car, he made you eat from his hand.
In 1958, Chinetti developed another marketing tool: the NART, or North American Racing Team. Ferrari provided the cars, while financing for the operation came from a handful of wealthy fellow racers.
If Enzo Ferrari didn’t feel like shipping a car from Europe to the United States, he would ask Chinetti to align it with NART. At times, Ferrari thought it didn’t make sense to put a factory effort into the North American Formula 1 finals; NART stepped in to line up the Italian brand’s full-time talents.
In the late 1970s, Chinetti sold his Ferrari dealerships and a couple of years later the NART team closed its doors. But during that time, the United States had the largest domestic market for Ferrari sales, and Chinetti had single-handedly replaced the global motorsports market for the better.
Read next: F1 driver dismissals: the most brutal dismissals and bitter disputes in F1 history