The AAC 815 was Enzo Ferrari’s first car – Thank Frankel it’s Friday

To me anniversaries are important. We use them to measure the passage of time and, indeed, our passage through time. And every new year, and especially every new decade, I think back through the years to find of any juicy anniversaries that are coming up. Goodwood does the same, and thank goodness for that because had it not chosen to celebrate 50 years of the Porsche 917 at the Members Meeting last year, I’d have never got to drive one and the world would have come to an end.

But I wonder how many people will this year be celebrating the 80^th anniversary of Ferrari’s first car? Anyone now squinting at the screen and remembering that it was only three years ago that Ferrari had its 70^th birthday should be advised I’m talking about the man, rather than the company.

Even so the only reason Ferrari the company wasn’t founded in 1940 was because his 1938 break contract with Alfa Romeo forbade him from putting his own name on a car for four years. The first Ferrari in all but name did indeed first appear 80 years ago and it was called the Auto Avio Costruzioni 815, or AAC for short.

It was a rush job, to put it mildly. In Hans Tanner and Doug Nye’s authoritative ‘Ferrari’ it says it took ‘less than four months to design, build and test two cars.’ Interestingly one dissenting voice is none other than Ferrari himself who wrote in his autobiography ‘My Terrible Joys’ ‘…I did build just one car for two young customers of mine in the old Scuderia Ferrari workshop in Modena’. You’d think you’d be able to remember how many examples of your very first car you’d built, particularly when choice was one or two, but there you go. It is not the only statement in that book that, shall we say, gives Ferrari’s version of the truth. For there is no question that two 815s were built, designed by Alberto Massimino, one for none other than a then 21-year-old Alberto Ascari, the other for the improbably entitled Marchese Lotario Rangoni Machiavelli di Modena.

The urgency meant the car had to rely heavily on Fiat parts, particularly the Fiat 508C which provided the chassis and basis for the engine. This may sound strange to anyone wondering how a 1.1-litre four-cylinder turned into a 1.5-litre straight-eight. In fact it was mainly the head design they were after. A new block was cast which carried a Ferrari crankshaft and as many Fiat internals as possible. When finished, the motor developed around 75bhp which wasn’t exactly sparkling: Aston Martin was producing 85bhp from the same capacity with just four cylinders in the middle of the previous decade. The car came with independent front suspension, a live rear axle and a rather attractive body courtesy of Touring of Milan.

The only race the 815s did in period was what passed for the Mille Miglia in 1940, renamed the Gran Premio di Brescia and involving a course of just over 100 miles to be completed nine times. Ascari’s car broke while leading its class on lap two, Rangoni inherited the lead and held it until lap eight when he too retired through mechanical failure.

In total Ferrari devotes just one paragraph of his autobiography to his very first car concluding, ‘the car was not a success, mainly on account of the haste with which it had been constructed.’

And that was that. Six weeks after the race Mussolini declared war on France and Britain. It would be seven years before Enzo Ferrari produced another car, but this time it would be with his name on the cam covers and with a rather different future ahead.

Enzo Ferrari image courtesy of Motorsport Images.