Why red Ferraris?

American cars colors are white with blue racing stripes running fore and aft way back before the Cobra. Ive seen both Corvettes as well as Vipers with those schemes in later years

 

A red car can look fast standing still, not a good thing if you actualy want to drive fast. Then some cars like 456gt's in particular look terrible in red.

 

Some interesting points made...

Don't forget that the first car made with a Ferrari badge on it was (apart from being a front-engined V12 barchetta) a Testarossa (named 'red-head' after the red cam-covers) painted in the yellow of the Cavallino Rampante shield. I believe the next several cars were this colour (Giallo?) as well, and possibly this was because Enzo had to stay away from the red of Alfa Romeo (and Italy) since his split from running Scuderia Ferrari on their behalf in the 1930s. The split meant he had to wait until 1947 before he could use his own name to market his cars.

It's also fair to say that he didn't really make (either by quantity, quality or price) what could reasonably be called 'road cars' for the first several years of running the company. Okay, race cars and road cars looked a lot more similar to each other back then than now, but his market was clearly to product hand-built race cars for the wealthy - not something that was used for moving the family about like an Austin or a Ford of the day. Once he entered competition in his own right, and beat his former employers at Alfa in the process, then I think he returned to painting his cars in Italian red - arguably as his team and his cars had earned the right to stand on the world stage at the highest level of racing by that time (say the late fifties) and Alfa had bowed out of some racing also.

The red tradition just stuck really. You could argue that it helped the branding and the aggresive image (not to mention keeping costs down like the Henry Ford Model-T in black), but in fact it's surprising how many non-red Fcars there were in the early days, as many buyers and teams used their own colours rather than Enzo's.

Personally, I love Fcars (any and all) but am not so keen on red as a colour for a car, and have had three non-red Fcars so far. As well as the photogenic properties mentioned before of red being rather a 'flat' colour which deadens perspective and detail, it also has the disadvantage of 'chalking' whereby over a long time the molecules of red dye get weaker (and whiter) at reflecting red light due to the action of heat and the sun, so that sometimes on a red car as young as 20 yrs old, you can see the shade getting lighter. To be fair this is usually more of an issue on a cheap mass-produced car like a Ford Escort but it still puts me off.....

Like all matters of fashion, these things go round in cycles, so that the proportion of Fcars bought in red goes up and down over time (I believe it was at an all-time low with 360s around 1999 to 2002 when over 50% in some countries were ordered in non-red). I don't know if I really believe that the colour affects the re-sale all that much. There are plenty of folks who like non-red as well (at least in modern times) so the market is there, and the larger V12 roadcars (i.e. not Enzos) all look much better in non-red IMHO.

You pays your money and you takes your choice, as they say.....

Overall, I'm more into enjoying driving my Fcar than worrying about what it looks like.

J.

 

Thanks for the correction, and also confirming that the colours are 100% the sponsors/teams colours and have not been related to the country of origin for many, many years.

Pete

 

I agree.

Ever since silver has become trendy people have been bashing red, however in a few years the silver fad will be over and red will be just as desirable as it was from 1950-1999.