A friend of mine recently told me the following story about how Lamborghini turned from manufacturing tractors to sportscars. Apparently Ferruccio Lamborghini had an argument with whomever was the main Ferrari guy at the time explaining to him how you could redesign the Ferraru gearboxes to perform better. The Ferrari guy disagreed with his suggestions which so angered Lamborghini that he decided to build a sportscar which used his gearbox design which lead to the legendary Lambo gearboxes of the time.
Any idea whether there is any truth behind this anecdote?
More or less, a number of things motivated Ferruccio to make cars that were better than Ferraris.
Enzo Ferrari was a pretty hardened ‘do it my way’ kind of guy, and anyone might be driven enough to prove him wrong, as he was the type to really raise the competitive edge in others.
In Ferruccio’s case, he actually had some means to accomplishing the goal of making better cars than Ferrari.
How direct was the motivation? Well, hard to say. I don’t think there was an arguement about a gearbox that saw Ferruccio storm off to some friends and start plans to invest and build world class cars…make for mice legends though.
Did Ferrari motivate Ferruccio? Probably. And Enzo’s personality and high ‘n’ mighty Ferrari attitude probably helped Ferruccio burn the mid night oil a little longer.
Ferruccio was also put off by comments that he was ‘just a tractor builder’ more-or-less, and those can certainly be seeds of motivation…not unlike any of us have in our every day life.
Ferrari sure did help motivate Ferruccio, via comments about a tractor builder, to just the brash Ferrari way.