At age twenty-three, he joined Alfa Romeo as a test driver, mechanic, and competitor. He earned his first victory on June 17, 1923, at a race in Ravenna. While he looked out from the podium, a man pushed through the crowd and introduced himself as the Count Enrico Baracca, father of the Italian war hero Francesco Baracca, a Modenese who’d shot down thirty-four enemy planes before he was killed in 1919. The ace pilot flew with a black Prancing Horse, the symbol of his squadron, painted on his plane’s fuselage. It was Baracca’s mother who told the young racing driver: “Ferrari, why don’t you put
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