Rare Road & Track vid with insights of Ferrari Factory circa mid 90’s.

It’s an interesting video to watch considering Ferrari was on the verge of bankruptcy before the release of the F355.

Enjoy .

 

https://auto.howstuffworks.com/ferrari-history.htm

“After Ferrari’s death in 1988, the Fiat-controlling Angelli family added another 40 percent to its 50-percent share of Ferrari; Piero Ferrari retained 10 percent.

In the half-decade that followed, the Ferrari company seemed to live on Enzo’s legacy, with no definitive voice to set it on track. Alain Prost narrowly missed winning the F1 championship in 1990, then the team fell considerably off the pace.

The road cars also suffered. By the early 1990s, Ferraris no longer were regular winners of magazine comparison tests. Quality control suffered. Rocked by worldwide recession, sales plummeted, from nearly 4,600 in 1991 to less than half that in 1993.

Fortunately, Ferrari’s management hadn’t been deceived by those lofty late-’80s sales figures and had brought in a new captain for the ship. In late 1991, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo was named Ferrari president and CEO. He was a man with a mission.

“I had just bought a 348 with my own money,” he recalled 10 years after his hiring, “and, with the exception of its good looks, I was utterly disappointed.”

Charismatic and focused, Montezemolo transformed the company in many ways. Under his leadership, one outstanding model after another left the gates of Maranello: the 355, 360 and 430, the 550 Maranello and Enzo, to name a few.

Montezemolo set about righting the Formula 1 effort, triggering the Schumacher era of utter domination. He also orchestrated the 1999 purchase of Maserati from Fiat and the turnaround of that former crosstown rival.

Ferrari was most certainly back, and it wasn’t just sales numbers and F1 titles that proved it. When debt-laden Fiat sold 34 percent of its Ferrari holdings to several banks in 2002 for approximately $700 million, it established the worth of Ferrari/Maserati at approximately $2.1 billion, or about one-third that of Fiat.

At the time, combined Ferrari and Maserati annual production was around 8,000 cars. Fiat manufactured approximately 1.7 million vehicles per year.

But Montezemolo’s vision extended beyond what the public saw on the roads and at the racetrack. He wanted to create an entirely new working environment, one that, as Ferrari literature expressed it, “put people at the center of innovation.”