Stephen Bayley

Ferrari – heavy, expensive, wasteful, dangerous and addictive

Stephen Bayley wonders whether there's ever been a more beautiful machine

Has a more beautiful machine in all of mankind’s fretful material endeavours ever been made than a ’60 Ferrari 250 Granturismo? Go to the Design Museum and decide.

I have driven many Ferraris and the experience is always unique. They are alive, demanding, feral, sometimes even violent or truculent. Addictive, too. Once, in Haverfordwest, I arrived sweating and puffing after seven hours in traffic. I parked the 246 GT at the hotel for a moment but then, unable to ignore the hot, seductive car, I got back in and drove up and down the coast road; up and down, up and down. Just because it was there.

Kierkegaard thought that ‘the best demonstration of the wretchedness of life is obtained through a consideration of its glory’. Thus, the motor car. Heavy, expensive, wasteful, dangerous, but romantic too. The car is the ultimate analogue experience: the laws of nature made explicit with explosions and exhausts, forces and fears, sculpted metal. And Ferrari is the ultimate car: a machine-for-driving-in conceived and executed without compromise.

But in this year of its 70th birthday, London, Paris and Oxford have announced plans to ban cars — or at least the oil-burning sort. As petrol cedes to electricity and brute analogue certainties cede to epicene digital abstractions, as driving becomes a gruelling chore, the Design Museum’s Ferrari exhibition has an elegiac quality. Or it might have had, if executed a little differently.

What is Ferrari? One answer is: a symbol of Italy’s post-war ricostruzione. The Vespa scooter and Fiat Cinquecento had similar roles, but were democratic forms of transport to mobilise peasants, women and priests. Ferrari was different: lordly and magnificently detached from the mundane, but nonetheless a superb demonstration of Italy’s established national genius in craft and art.

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