Enzo Ferrari Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
58 free Enzo Ferrari trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Enzo Ferrari trivia quiz covers the driver from Modena who was turned down by Fiat and went on to build the most famous name in motor racing. It starts with the man: the flu that took his father and brother, the CMN test-driving job, the hillclimb debut, the Alfa Romeo years, the first Grand Prix win at Ravenna and the meeting with the Baracca family that gave him the prancing horse. Then it follows the company: Scuderia Ferrari in 1929, the split with Alfa, the two 815s for the Mille Miglia, the bombed factory, the move to Maranello and the V12 125 S of 1947. The second half covers the triumphs and the wounds: Ascari's first title, six straight Le Mans wins, Dino's death, the 1957 Mille Miglia crash and the manslaughter charge, the Great Walkout, the aborted Ford sale that spawned the GT40, Fiat's 50%, Lauda and Villeneuve, Piero and Lina Lardi, the F40, the nicknames, the films with Adam Driver and Remo Girone, and the museum on his birthplace. About a third of the questions suit any F1 fan; the rest are for the tifosi. Our Formula One and Ferrari cars quizzes cover the rest of the story. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Enzo Ferrari, Ferrari, Scuderia Ferrari and related people and cars, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Italian city was Enzo Ferrari born in 1898?
Modena
Modena. His birth certificate is dated 20 February 1898, but Enzo said he was born two days earlier and that heavy snow had kept the birth from being registered.
Q 02In which city, a short trip from his home, did the 10-year-old Enzo watch his first motor race in 1908?
Bologna
Bologna. The family outing was to watch the cars on a circuit along the Via Emilia, and the boy came away from it set on becoming a racing driver.
Q 03Which carmaker turned the young Enzo down after World War I, then bought half his company in 1969?
Fiat
Fiat. Rejected in Turin in the winter of 1918-19, he found work as a test driver for a small firm that stripped down light trucks so their chassis could be rebuilt as cars.
Q 04In what kind of event did Enzo make his racing debut in 1919?
A hillclimb
A hillclimb. He raced from Parma up to Poggio di Berceto, and only later that year took a CMN to Sicily for the far more famous Targa Florio.
Q 05What did the white-haired Enzo almost always wear in public during his later decades?
Dark glasses
Dark glasses. They were part of a carefully kept air of mystery: he rarely left his home town and seldom went to a race, following his team through television and written reports.
Q 06Why did Enzo begin selling road cars to the public in the late 1940s?
To pay for his racing
To pay for his racing. Road cars interested him little, and he took to selling them, grudgingly at first, only as a way to finance the Scuderia's Grand Prix and endurance campaigns.
Q 07Ferrari's prancing horse emblem was originally painted on the plane of which Italian World War I fighter ace?
Francesco Baracca
Francesco Baracca. Italy's leading ace was shot down in 1918; by Enzo's account the airman's mother later urged him to carry her son's horse on his cars for luck.
Q 08Which part of Ferrari's prancing-horse badge did Enzo add in honour of his home city?
The yellow background
The yellow background. Canary yellow is his birthplace's civic colour, and the finished shield brought instant luck: on its first outing, at the 1932 Spa 24 Hours, the team's cars came first and second.
Q 09Which Italian rival quit Grand Prix racing in 1955 and handed its cars and equipment to Enzo free of charge?
Lancia
Lancia. In financial trouble after its lead driver was killed, it gave up racing, and Juan Manuel Fangio then won the 1956 world title in the inherited cars, rebadged as Ferraris.
Q 10Which German city's rearing-horse arms, also on Porsche's badge, does one legend link to Ferrari's prancing horse?
Stuttgart
Stuttgart. One tale has the wartime ace painting the horse to mark a downed pilot from that city, but his own museum says he took the emblem from his old cavalry regiment.
Q 11What does 'scuderia', as in Scuderia Ferrari, literally mean in Italian?
Stable
Stable. Enzo founded the team in 1929 as a club that prepared Alfa Romeos for wealthy owner-drivers, and within four years it was running Alfa Romeo's whole racing effort.
Q 12What event in 1932 prompted Enzo to retire from driving?
The birth of his son Dino
The birth of his son Dino. With the baby due, Enzo drove his last race in August 1931, finishing second, and from then on put his energy into managing other men's driving.
Q 13What kept Enzo's name off the firm he founded after leaving Alfa in 1939?
His exit deal
Q 21Who won Ferrari's first Formula One world championship, in 1952?
Alberto Ascari
Alberto Ascari. Enzo had put him in one of his very first cars in 1940; twelve years on he won six championship Grands Prix in a row to take the title.
Q 22At which British circuit did Ferrari win a world championship Grand Prix for the first time, in 1951?
Silverstone
Silverstone. A year earlier Enzo had kept his cars away from the first-ever championship race at the same track, sending them to a minor event in Belgium instead.
Q 23Ferrari won which endurance race six years running, from 1960 to 1965?
Le Mans
Le Mans. Then the well ran dry: after 1965 Ferrari did not win the race outright again until it returned to the top class in 2023, 58 years later.
His exit deal. Alfa barred him from racing under his own name for four years, so the new firm was called Auto Avio Costruzioni and spent the war making machine tools.
Q 14The first car Enzo built, the 815 of 1940, was made for which race?
The Mille Miglia
The Mille Miglia. Two cars were built in a few months for the 1940 race, and neither saw the finish: both retired with mechanical failures.
Q 15What does the name of Enzo's first car, the 815 of 1940, stand for?
Eight cylinders and 1.5 litres
Eight cylinders and 1.5 litres. With only months to build it, and race rules demanding production-based cars, the engine and chassis were adapted from a small family saloon's parts.
Q 16Why did Enzo move his factory out of the city to the small town of Maranello in 1943?
He feared Allied bombing
He feared Allied bombing. Getting out of the city did not save the works: the bombers found the new Maranello factory anyway and hit it twice before the war ended.
Q 17Which British star travelled to Italy in 1951 for a promised Ferrari drive, only to find the car given to another driver?
Stirling Moss
Stirling Moss. He never raced for the factory team: a deal for him to drive a privately run Ferrari was at last agreed ten years later, just before the crash that ended his career.
Q 18What kind of engine did the Ferrari 125 S have, setting a pattern for decades?
A V12
A V12. Each of its twelve tiny cylinders displaced about 125 cc, which is where the model's name came from, and twelve cylinders became the marque's signature.
Q 19Which famous American race did Enzo's works team enter just once, sending a single car across the Atlantic in 1952?
The Indianapolis 500
The Indianapolis 500. It then counted towards the Formula One world championship, though Europe's teams usually ignored it; Enzo's lone car retired with a failed wheel and he never went back.
Q 20Who ended Ferrari's 21-year wait for a tenth drivers' title?
Michael Schumacher
Michael Schumacher. Enzo saw nine drivers' titles, the last in 1979; Schumacher arrived in 1996 already a double champion, broke a leg in 1999 and came back to end the wait in 2000.
Q 24Which illness did Enzo's son Dino live with until his death in 1956?
Muscular dystrophy
Muscular dystrophy. Too frail to race, Dino worked on engine designs from his sickbed, and his grieving father put the name Dino on the V6 cars that followed.
Q 25Which Ferrari driver died with his co-driver and at least nine spectators in Italy's 1957 1,000-mile road race?
Alfonso de Portago
Alfonso de Portago. A tyre failed on a fast straight near Guidizzolo, and the disaster led Italy to ban racing on public roads, ending its most famous road race for good.
Q 26What was Enzo charged with after the 1957 Guidizzolo disaster?
Manslaughter
Manslaughter. Investigators blamed the tyres his car was running, and the case hung over him for four years before he was cleared in 1961.
Q 27What happened at Ferrari in the 'Great Walkout' of late 1961?
Eight senior managers left at once
Eight senior managers left at once. Enzo sacked them, his chief engineer and team manager among them, and they regrouped to launch a rival marque, ATS, which soon failed.
Q 28Which American carmaker spent weeks negotiating to buy Ferrari in 1963 before Enzo walked away?
Ford
Ford. Within a month of the talks collapsing, the company set up a special unit to build an endurance racer of its own, the GT40, which went on to end Ferrari's long winning run.
Q 29Why did Enzo abandon the 1963 sale to the Americans?
He would not be left in control of racing
He would not be left in control of racing. After weeks of hard bargaining he pulled out just before signing; six years later he sold half the firm to an Italian buyer that left the racing to him.
Q 30Which motorcycle-champion-turned-driver won Ferrari's 1964 F1 title?
John Surtees
John Surtees. He took the crown by a single point in the last race, in Mexico, after the team signalled his teammate to slow down and let him through into second place.