Ferrari's Prancing Horse Was a Gift From a Grieving Mother
A countess handed young racer Enzo Ferrari a photo of her son's plane and told him to paint its emblem on his car.
Acquired · Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team?One evening in the years after World War I, an Italian countess pressed a photograph into the hands of a young race car driver named Enzo Ferrari.
The picture showed her son, Francesco Baracca, standing in front of his fighter plane. On the side of the plane was a black prancing horse, the good luck charm Baracca had carried through the skies. Below the image, the countess had written an inscription telling Enzo to use the symbol himself.
Baracca had been Italy's leading fighter ace, credited with 34 aerial victories, and a national hero. He was killed in combat in 1918. His parents, a count and countess, had become fans of Enzo, then a promising young driver still years away from building his own cars.
That is how the most famous badge in automobiles came to exist, not in a design studio but as an inheritance from a family in mourning. As the story goes, the countess one night after the war urged him to paint the black horse on his car because it would bring him luck.
When Enzo launched his racing team in the late 1920s, he put the gift to use. He called it Scuderia Ferrari, which means Ferrari stable in Italian, a team of drivers and race cars then competing for Italy's big carmaker Alfa Romeo. A prancing horse coming out of a stable was almost too perfect.
He set the black horse inside a bright yellow shield, yellow being the color of his hometown of Modena, with the red, white, and green of the Italian flag across the top. It was both a memorial and a canny piece of branding, tying an unknown team to a hero every Italian already knew.
The odd part is where the badge first appeared. The first vehicles to carry the prancing horse were not Ferraris at all. In old photographs, you can see an Alfa Romeo badge on the front and, just in front of the door, the square yellow shield with the black horse and the letters S F for Scuderia Ferrari.
More than a century after Baracca's death in 1918, the black horse he had carried on his plane still appears on Ferrari cars.
Questions people ask
Why is the Ferrari badge yellow?
Yellow is the traditional color of Modena, the city in northern Italy where Enzo Ferrari was born in 1898 and started his career. He placed the black horse on a yellow background and added the red, white, and green of the Italian flag above it.
Was the horse always on a Ferrari?
No. For its first decade and more, Scuderia Ferrari was the racing arm for Alfa Romeo, so its horse badge appeared on Alfa Romeo cars. Ferrari did not build and sell its first car under its own name until the late 1940s, after World War II.