Luca Cordero di Montezemolo may soon exchange one presidential chair for another. Ferrari’s Chairman announced today in an open letter to Italiafutura, a liberal-centrist think-tank that he formed in 2009, that he would be a candidate for the presidency in the 2013 Italian elections.
“Italiafutura with its 40,000 members will be actively engaged in 2012 to try and change politics in Italy”, said di Montezemolo in the letter, which was published on Gazzeta Dello Sport.
“The Second Republic has failed. When the Italian voters return to the polls, they must be offered a whole series of new ideas and new leaders in the elections, so that they can turn their backs on what has been a period of total failure in Italian politics,” di Montezemolo added.
Di Montezemolo, who apart from being Ferrari’s Chairman has also been the President of the Italian industry association Confidustria, has been tipped to enter politics for a long time. He always refuted those reports as nothing more than rumors. Up until now, that is.
The Ferrari Chairman, aged 64, has a track record that speaks for itself. After racing briefly for a private Lancia rally team, he joined Fiat S.p.A. and in 1973 moved to Ferrari as Enzo Ferrari’s assistant. A year later, he was promoted to head of Fiat’s racing activities, and subsequently moved on to many senior managerial positions.
After successfully managing the organizing committee of the 1990 FIFA World Cup that was held in Italy, he was appointed as Ferrari’s president by Fiat owner Gianni Agnielli himself.
He also set out to improve the Prancing Horse’s production cars quality and drivability to much higher standards – as he famously said once to one of his employees, “don’t lie to me, I am a Ferrari owner, I know the cars”.
That was, perhaps, the easy part. The most challenging task was making the struggling Formula 1 team, which had last won the world championship in 1979 with Jody Scheckter, a top contender again.
Needless to say, he succeeded in both tasks. He created a very strong Formula 1 ensemble by recruiting top staff such as former Peugeot Sport manager Jean Todt, designer Rory Byrne, motorsport principal Ross Brawn and, of course, Michael Schumacher. The Scuderia won the constructor’s championship in 1999 and from 2000, with Michael Schumacher as its number one driver, broke nearly every F1 record.
Di Montezemolo also improved Ferrari’s road cars by a wide margin, transforming them from unreliable, and more often than not tricky to handle, rich-boy-toys to top-of-the-range supercars featuring pioneering technology and the benchmark against which any rival is measured.
With the Italian economy in a mess and the political scene in turmoil after the resignation of former president Silvio Berlusconni amid accusations of being involved in a number of scandals, di Montezemolo has finally stepped forth in the political scene.
He says that the next presidential elections will be “a date with history”. To that end, he wants to mobilize Italiafutura members: “We must start working even harder to create a strong, united network throughout Italy by June and also work hard to introduce realistic measures to tackle the numerous emergency situations in the country.”
With most Italian politicians rating very low in the public opinion, and Ferrari being a symbol of national pride for the Italians, we dare predict that di Montezemolo’s chances for the presidency are anything but slim.
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