Gallery: Scuderia Ferrari turns 90

Scuderia Ferrari - the racing team, not the car manufacturer - is celebrating its 90th birthday this year. So naturally the Ferrari Museum is having a special exhibition to celebrate. The ‘90 Years” exhibition runs until May 2020.

The man himself - Enzo Ferrari, who had by then been racing for five years himself - set up ‘Societa Anonima Scuderia Ferrari’ in 1929. With cars supplied by Alfa Romeo, it entered its first race, the Mille Miglia, in 1930, but the prancing horse motif didn’t become a thing until 1932’s Le Mans 24hrs.

It was attached to an Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 Spider - seen here in the Ferrari Museum’s exhibition.

In the early Thirties Alfa was running low on cash, so for a time Ferrari was effectively its official racing team. A return to solvency a few years later saw Alfa buy a share of Scuderia Ferrari, and make Enzo the head of the newly set-up Alfa Corse - the company’s official team. But Enzo left a year later, when WW2 broke out in 1939, with a promise not to use the Ferrari name on cars for four years.

Enzo set up a new company - Auto Avio Costruzioni (AAC) - and went to work making industrial tooling and machinery. But he didn’t stop thinking about racing. In 1940 he built the AAC Tipo 815, which was based on a Fiat platform. It competed in that year’s Mille Miglia (or Brescia GP), driven by none other than Alberto Ascari, but the outbreak of war and the resulting cessation of motorsport meant it didn’t see much other action.

Two were built and only one remains. It’s not in the exhibition, and nor is the first proper Ferrari - 1947’s Tipo 125S.

It was the 1950s before the Ferrari name really took off - sales more than tripled between 1950 and 1960. The exhibition features the Ferrari 500 F2, in which Alberto Ascari won back-to-back world titles in 1952 and 1953. Ferrari had already won its first Mille Miglia in 1948 and its first Le Mans 24hrs in 1949.

Other open-wheel cars on display include the Ferrari D50 in which Fangio won the fourth of his five world titles, the 246 F1 in which Mike Hawthorn beat Stirling Moss to a world championship by a lone point, and the 156 F1 in which John Surtees scored his first win in 1963.

Niki Lauda’s 312T is there too - the car with which he won his first F1 world championship, which has an unusual transverse gearbox - and so’s Jody Scheckter’s 1979 championship-winning 312 T4.

As for the modern era of F1, we have Michael Schumacher’s F2004, in which he won 13 races and his seventh and final world championship in 2004, and Kimi Raikkonen’s championship-winning F2007.

The exhibition also features the 166MM, which won at Le Mans, Spa and the Mille Miglia, and the 275P which won the 12hrs of Sebring in 1964, plus the Nurburgring 1000km and Le Mans 24hrs.

The “90 Years” exhibition is running until next May. If the pics we’ve shown you haven’t already convinced you it’s worth a visit, how about the fact it’s on at the same time as the “Hypercar” exhibition, which is supposed to celebrate the Ferraris that “signalled landmark advances in the marque’s technological evolution”. It includes a 288 GTO, F40, F50, Enzo, LaFerrari and a full-size mock-up of the one-off P80/C.