Palace revolt: Did Enzo Ferrari’s wife cause a Formula 1 walk-out in 1961?

At the end of the 1961 Formula 1 season, Scuderia Ferrari should have been celebrating. Its car, nicknamed the “sharknose”, had been a triumph. Ferrari driver Phil Hill won the World Championship. It should have carried that momentum into 1962.

Instead, at the close of the season, several key members of Scuderia Ferrari walked out in what has since become known as a “palace revolt”. And it all comes down to Enzo Ferrari’s wife, Laura.

Laura Ferrari’s role in Ferrari’s Formula 1 operation

Laura Domenica Garello and Enzo Ferrari first met in the early 1920s as the future motorsport magnate was in the earliest stages of his career.

According to legend, Ferrari and Garello met at the Porto Nuoa train station in Turin, and almost immediately after, the fair-haired 21-year-old became Enzo Ferrari’s companion.

As Enzo Ferrari continued establishing his own racing career and, ultimately, moving into team leadership roles at Alfa Romeo, he and Laura were inseparable. They traveled to race tracks all around Italy together before they married on April 28, 1923.

It was then that things changed.

This story is a tie-in to Elizabeth Blackstock’s podcast, “Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys.” Her latest episode unties the complicated ways that Enzo Ferrari’s love life impacted his business and his race team.

Reflecting on the day later, Ferrari took a rather ungenerous view of the whole thing.

“I married young, somewhere around 1920,” he wrote. “I cannot remember the exact year, as I have mislaid the marriage certificate.”

Then, he continued writing in the third person: “This young man declared that nothing else mattered where there was love. I later came to realize that the rest did matter and matter a lot.”

And it seems like that realization came quickly. As Brock Yates writes in his biography of Ferrari, Laura largely disappeared from the racing world. Where she once was found near her beloved Enzo, no matter where in the country he was racing, she was soon expected to return home and take on the standard duties of the wife.

Yates hypothesizes that it only took a few months before Ferrari was sleeping with other women.

Divorce was explicitly banned by the Italian Catholic church, but there was at least one bright spot in the Ferrari marriage. On January 19, 1932, Laura gave birth to a son they named Alfredo Ferrari — better known as Dino.

Laura spent her time raising Dino and taking care of the financials of the Scuderia Ferrari empire. Meanwhile, Enzo met a young woman named Lina Lardi and, during World War II, she birthed a son named Piero — Enzo Ferrari’s second son.

Sadly, Dino Ferrari was not a healthy boy. Historians and medical professionals now believe that young Dino had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, but at the time, it would have been almost impossible to receive that diagnosis. Instead, Dino grew weaker and weaker, having to leave school to spend more time in bed.

Even there, Dino aimed to leave some kind of legacy, helping Ferrari engineer Vittorio Jano sort through the details of a new 1.5-liter V6 engine.

When Dino died on June 30, 1956, at just 24 years old, the Ferrari marriage shattered. Both Enzo and Laura began pointing fingers at one another, and both grew more erratic, irritable, and bitter.

Still overwhelmed by grief several years later, Laura Ferrari discovered her husband’s second family.

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As the 1960s got underway, Laura Ferrari was perhaps seeking a purpose. Yes, she’d long been involved in the finances and business operations of the Scuderia Ferrari — but with her only son dead and the discovery that her husband had a second family, it’s likely that she needed a change.

Laura Ferrari began to play a greater role in the day-to-day operations of the Scuderia. As work began on the car that would become known as the Tipo 156, or the “sharknose”. Laura Ferrari began to turn up in the workshop and request to attend races — making ample stops along the way to visit cathedrals and monasteries.

She carried a briefcase filled with cash but never paid for anything, instead walking out of shops with items and forcing others to pay on her behalf. She even flew to America for the 12 Hours of Sebring.

No one knew what to make of her sudden presence or her more active role in the racing activities of Ferrari. Was Laura serving as a mole, carrying information back to her husband? Did her financial stake in the company encourage her to take a stronger stance as more and more starstruck fans began to assemble around Enzo?

We don’t know — but it’s clear that in October, eight of the most critical Scuderia Ferrari personnel walked out of the company and, via a lawyer, informed Enzo Ferrari that they were not happy with the way things worked. Ferrari, suspicious that they’d attempt to stage a coup, responded by firing them.

Among the men fired were chief engineers Carlo Chiti and Giotto Bizzarrini, as well as the team’s sporting director Romolo Tavoni. All three men formed a new team, Automobili Turismo e Sport, that folded in disrepute by 1964.

It took two years for Scuderia Ferrari to recover, but the walkout resulted in ever more conflict in the team camp. Mauro Forghieri, the man later responsible for the iconic 312 F1 car, was promoted to chief racing engineer, though his initial success was hampered by new team manager Eugenio Dragoni — a man so overbearing that he drove away some of the team’s best drivers.

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