Did Enzo Ferrari call it the most beautiful car ever made?

The usual form is that Enzo Ferrari, seeing the E-Type at its launch in March 1961, called it the most beautiful car ever made. It appears in that shape on auction catalogues, in newspaper features, on dealer listings and in Jaguar's own marketing.

Three separate claims are folded into that one sentence: that Ferrari said it, that he said it at Geneva, and that he said those words. They rest on different evidence, and they are worth taking apart.

What exactly did Enzo Ferrari say about the E-Type?

The remark is documented, and it is documented long before the internet. Gino Rancati was an Italian motoring journalist who knew Ferrari personally over many years. His biography Ferrari, lui was published by Sonzogno of Milan in 1977, a 170-page paperback. Ferrari lived another eleven years after it appeared.

The passage sits in chapter 19, at page 164. In English it runs, in a translation posted by an owner of the first edition: when the Jaguar E-Type cabriolet comes out, Ferrari tells him that he considers it the most beautiful car in the world, and also that he would like to own a Rolls-Royce but cannot afford it.

That is the whole of it. One clause, in a paragraph about how Ferrari handled journalists.

Where does the quotation come from?

Rancati's book was translated by Fergus McGrail and published in Britain as Enzo Ferrari: The Man by GT Foulis of Sparkford, 198 pages at £9.95, brought out quickly after Ferrari's death in 1988.

Bill Boddy reviewed it in Motor Sport in March 1989, at page 54. He wrote that some of the stories may have a touch of the apocryphal about them, "such as the report that he thought the E-Type Jaguar the most beautiful car in the world".

That is the earliest appearance in English this archive has been able to locate, and it is worth pausing on what it shows. The doubt is not a modern correction applied to a cherished old story. The first English printing of the remark carried the doubt in the same sentence, from the editor of Motor Sport.

What the source does not say

Three things follow from reading Rancati rather than the quotation.

It is not "the most beautiful car ever made". Rancati has the most beautiful car in the world, a judgement about cars then on sale rather than a verdict on the whole history of the motor car. The popular form is a stronger claim than the source supports.

It is not set at Geneva. Rancati's sentence says only that Ferrari told him this when the E-Type cabriolet came out. He is recording a private remark made to him, his biographer, at an unstated time and place. Nothing in the passage puts either man at a motor show.

It is the open two-seater. Rancati says cabriolet. The car unveiled on the Jaguar stand at Geneva on 15 March 1961 was the fixed-head coupe. The roadster 77 RW arrived afterwards, driven overnight from Coventry by Norman Dewis because one demonstration car could not meet the demand. If the remark is about the cabriolet, it is not a remark about the car standing on the stand at the moment of the unveiling.

Did he say it at the 1961 Geneva Motor Show?

The Geneva setting comes from somewhere else entirely, and from a different remark. Norman Dewis, Jaguar's chief test driver, was certainly at Geneva. He described Ferrari coming to the Jaguar stand and saying that it was a beautiful car, that Jaguar had made nothing better, and that there was only one thing wrong with it: it did not carry a Ferrari badge.

That is a joke about a badge. It is not Rancati's sentence, it is not the quotation in circulation, and the two accounts have no source in common. Three difficulties attach to it.

Nobody has dated Dewis's telling early. He recorded it on film and repeated it at shows and in interviews in his later years. Enthusiasts who have gone looking have not found a version earlier than about 2011, half a century after the event. Dewis died in 2019 at 98. That does not make the account false. He was describing something he said he witnessed, and he was there. It does mean there is no early record to check it against.

There is a language problem. Dewis spoke no meaningful Italian and Ferrari spoke little English in public. Dewis's own answer, given in person to an enthusiast who questioned him about it, was that Ferrari spoke Italian and always had an assistant with him. Every version that reaches us in English is therefore a translation, made on the spot, by somebody nobody has named.

It is not established that Enzo Ferrari was at Geneva at all. No photograph, no press report and no document has been produced placing him at the 1961 show. The case for his being there is Dewis's testimony. Against it is that Ferrari was famously reluctant to travel and, from the mid 1950s, rarely attended even races. For it is that Geneva is a short run from Modena by road, and that visits between rival stands did happen.

What has been looked for and not found

The most thorough public work on this question is a thread on the Jag-lovers E-Type forum that ran from June 2017 to November 2023 across some 246 posts. This archive is indebted to it, and several of the findings above are theirs.

No 1961 press report carrying the remark has been located. Two standard histories were checked by participants and found empty: Chris Harvey's E-Type: End of an Era of 1977, and Philip Porter's E-Type: The Definitive History of 1989, whose 32-page chapter on the launch mentions Dewis five times and Enzo Ferrari not once. One participant with fifty-odd Jaguar books and a run of Road & Track going back to the late 1940s reported finding nothing before the 2000s.

Two cautions about that. Absence from a handful of private collections is weaker evidence than it feels, and nobody appears to have gone systematically through the March and April 1961 show coverage itself. And a remark made privately to a biographer would not be expected to appear in the 1961 press at all, so the silence tells against the Geneva version of the story rather than against Rancati's.

One objection raised in that thread was never answered, and this archive repeats it rather than resolving it. A native Italian speaker argued that the Italian sentence now circulating reads as though it had been translated back out of English, its tenses present where an Italian writing in 1977 about a past event would have used the past. That sentence traces to a post on a Ferrari forum rather than to anyone transcribing the book. The one participant who bought the 1977 first edition confirmed the passage is there and photographed the page, but published his rendering in English. So the passage itself is real while the Italian text in circulation is of uncertain provenance.

Is the Enzo Ferrari quote true?

It is reasonable to say that Ferrari's biographer recorded him admiring the E-Type, in print, in 1977, while Ferrari was alive to object and did not.

It is not reasonable to say that Enzo Ferrari called the E-Type the most beautiful car ever made, or that he said it at Geneva in 1961, or to set it in quotation marks as though it were a recorded utterance. The words are a translation of a paraphrase written by a journalist recalling a private conversation, and the setting everyone gives it belongs to a different account of a different remark.

The honest version is duller and more interesting. A man who did not hand out compliments told his biographer that a rival's car was the most beautiful in the world, and the rival's owners have been improving on the wording ever since.

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