Ferrari and red go together like hand-crafted pasta and yummy sauce. Indeed, back in the 1990s about 80 per cent of Ferrari road cars were ordered in red – although these days, with more choice and personalisation, it’s more like 40 per cent. Still a lot.
But red is not technically the Ferrari brand’s colour of choice. It was chosen for the marque.
Early last century, the Association Internationale des Automobile Clubs Reconnus (AIACR, the forerunner of today’s FIA) decreed that motorsport teams should have cars painted in different colours to represent nationalities. France got blue, Great Britain was green, Germany white (later changed to bare-metal silver) and Italy the now-iconic Rosso Corsa red. The colours were a convention dating back to the early 1900s, but became well established as a rule by the inter-war period.
It stuck until 1968, by which time the AIACR was long gone and corporate sponsorship under the FIA was introduced. Ferrari kept red, but changed the shade from 1996-2007 (coinciding with Marlboro’s title sponsorship), although Rossa Corsa came back at the Monaco Grand Prix in 2007.
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There have been dozens of different Ferrari road-car reds through the decades; five individual variations are available for the new SF90 PHEV alone, for example, not to mention the bespoke colours the factory creates for customers.
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Actually, the only colour constant through Ferrari’s history is the Prancing Horse shield/badge, created by Enzo Ferrari himself. He told the story publically only once, in a 1985 interview. The horse is a tribute to a heroic World War I fighter pilot, and is always black: “I added the Canary Yellow background, which is the colour of Modena [Ferrari’s home town]”.
The logo was first used as a shield in 1932 on the Alfa Romeo racing cars run by Ferrari, and as a rectangular badge on the 1947 125 S, Ferrari’s first road car. The shield has an “SF” (Scuderia Ferrari) script along the bottom, while the badge reads “Ferrari” instead. But the colours and Italian flag across the top are always the same.