What I learned from reading Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine by Brock Yates.
It was over a strangely disappointing anticlimax to a life that had spanned most of the history of motorsports.
His health had been in severe decline for months, and the end had been expected.
While his mind remained quick to the last, the powerful body had long since crumbled under the sheer weight of years.
Editorial writers around the world groped for words to express what Enzo Ferrari had meant.
Many tried to describe him as an automotive pioneer, which he was not.
Others called him a great racing driver and engineer, which he was not.
He was exactly what he had repeatedly said he was, an agitator of men, and he remained true to his credo to the day he died.
If there was one essential quality about the man, it was his iron bound tenacity, his fierce devotion to the single cause of winning automobile races with cars bearing his name.
From 1930 onward, for nearly 60 years, hardly a day passed when this thought was not foremost in his mind.
Win or lose, he unfailingly answered the bell.
In that sense, his devotion to his own self described mission was without precedent, at least within the world of motorsports.
For that alone, he towered over his peers.
Enzo Ferrari, the last of the great automotive titans, was gone, never to be replaced.
That was an excerpt about the death of Enzo Ferrari, and it comes from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Enzo, the man in the machine, written by Brock Yates.
And I wanted to start there because this is the third different, this is the third podcast that I've done on Enzo Ferrari.
The first two, in case you haven't gone back and listened to them, it's founders number 97.
It's based on that book, go like Hell, which is the story about Ford versus Ferrari.
And number 98 is the biography.
Actually, number 98 is the longest biography I've ever read from the podcast.
If you don't include the book of all of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters, that biography of Enzo Ferrari is almost 1000 pages long.