One of my relatives, now retired, worked for his whole career for FIAT and has obviously still many contacts there, he said to me last year : “To say that Ferrari F1 effort is backed by FIAT is idiotic to say the least, if we put together the money Ferrari got from FIAT in the last 10 years we couldn’t pay 1/10 of MS salary for a season.”
Ferrari is a lot more helpful for FIAT than FIAT is for Ferrari, particularly for advertising but not only, for many years Ferrari has been one of the few profitable companies of the FIAT group in the automotive sector.
Remember that the only reason Enzo, with huge financial problems, sold to FIAT in 60s was because Giovanni Agnelli guaranteed to him total control on the racing activity, after Enzo’s death FIAT got control and the results in late 80s -> mid 90s are the proof that it wasn’t a good idea. And in fact the Ferrari team in F1 started to be good again exactly because, with LDM arrival (then Todt etc etc), they became completely independent from both FIAT budget and FIAT control, the former being the key for the latter.
The less interference FIAT has in Ferrari, the better and everybody, both in Ferrari and in Fiat, knows it very well.
manchild wrote:
They have became self-financing at once and bought off all their actions from FIAT?
It’s been years now that Ferrari F1 team budget comes solely from Ferrari production cars and sponsors, mainly from Philip Morris (Marlboro) that “owns” the advertising space on almost the whole car (bar few areas for technical partners). This way Ferrari, till 2011 when contract with PM expires, is guaranteed a given amount of money no matter what happens and without having to manage relationship with many sponsors, that is totally up to PM now, they can pay the money entirely or by selling advertising space to other sponsors (incidentally, it’s because of that that Vodafone left for 2007).
