Interview: Luca di Montezemolo

Luca di Montezemolo has come to terms with life after Ferrari, yet the pain of his firing in September 2014 has not gone away. Talk Ferrari and it’s obvious the anguish, the unfairness, remains.

As does the charm, the friendly greeting, the elegantly informal clothing, the longish hair, the constant hand movements, the enthusiasm, the piercing blue eyes, and the quick assessment and understanding. Even if, at 74, Montezemolo has perhaps lost five percent of the dynamic energy that makes him one of Italy’s most successful business tycoons.

In the eight years since that fiasco (beautifully captured in Andrew Frankel’s I Witnessed: Luca’s last laugh) Montezemolo could not bring himself to speak of the circumstances of his final weeks as chairman of Ferrari, where he had reigned supreme for almost 23 years.

‘Please, how it ended I cannot really talk about,’ he told Mark Hughes, the much-respected F1 journalist, in 2016.