WHEN FERRARI JUST DOESN’T DO IT FOR YOU
CONFLICT ISN’T AN essential component of supercar start-ups and ambitious racing endeavours, but it clearly helps. Without Enzo Ferrari and Ferruccio Lamborghini’s well-documented dust-up, the latter would never have felt moved to build his own sports cars and supercars. Likewise, if it hadn’t been for Ferrari’s last-minute rejection of Ford’s buy-out in favour of Fiat, Henry Ford II would not have borne sufficient grudge to build the GT40 and win Le Mans.
Aptly, movie director and financier Jim Glickenhaus’s journey from prolific collector and commissioner of spectacular one-offs to fully fledged supercar maker has also been fuelled by a prickly relationship with Maranello.
Ironically, given Glickenhaus’s profession, this ascension to automaker has the scope and unlikely plot lines of a Hollywood blockbuster. Glickenhaus has risen from the gentle lawns of Pebble Beach in a car created for him to the cut-and-thrust of the Le Mans 24 Hours in a car created by him. For someone not born into an automotive dynasty, his is a feat few can claim.
Glickenhaus had been on the car scene for years, but his 2006 Pininfarina-designed P4/5 was a real watershed moment. Bold, beautiful and wilfully iconoclastic, it turned heads for all the right reasons. Not least was the fact that it used a then-new Enzo as its basis. Against expectations, Ferrari loved it so much that it gave the project its blessing, even allowing it to be referred to as the Ferrari P4/5. It’s one of the great private commissions of the modern era.
However the love-in was not to last.
