Agnelli Gets a Horse

To sports-car aficionados, the sinuous lines and throaty snarl of a Ferrari are the ultimate symbols of automotive sex appeal. Even Fiat Chairman Giovanni Agnelli, a man who can afford the fin est, drives a custom-built $50,000 Ferrari that has the driver's seat centered between two passengers' seats. His car can go 180 m.p.h., but Agnelli wants more; now he intends to add the entire Ferrari company to his growing Fiat organization. A merger announcement last week said that "the current relationship of technical collaboration will be trans formed during the year into equal participation." Ferrari, with assets of about $10 million, will become, in effect, the sports-car and racing division of Fiat.

Agnelli first proposed a merger in 1962, on the theory that Ferrari's illustrious reputation would add luster to Fiat's line of rather unglamorous work aday cars. Officials of Ford Motor Co.

also had eyes on Ferrari. Founder Enzo Ferrari, a onetime racing driver who rules his 30-year-old Modena plant with almost ducal authority, at first turned away both suitors, though he did agree to design the engine for Fiat's Dino Spider sports car. Since then, however, the prancing black horse of Modena, the longstanding insignia of Ferrari, has worn few winner's laurels. So far this year, Ferrari's single-seat Formula 1 cars have broken down in three major races -- Monte Carlo, the Grand Prix of Spain and of South Africa. The laborious production of about 700 handmade cars a year -- which sell for an average $12,000 each in Italy--can no longer sustain the rising cost of racing.

By contrast, things have never been better for Agnelli's Fiat (TIME cover, Jan. 17, 1969). Last year sales reached a record $2.1 billion. Agnelli spurred the trend of consolidation among European automakers by gaining effective control in 1968 of France's Citroen, which makes some of the world's most advanced mass-produced cars. In the long run, Fiat may profit more from Citroen's engineering techniques than from Ferrari's expensive elegance, but Agnelli can take pride in sustaining an incomparable piece of automotive history.

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