Why are Ferraris red? It was never Ferrari's choice

Transcript

Why do men want a red car? Not a fast car, a red one. Ask them and they will tell you it is passion or speed or something Italian in the blood. That answer is comfortable and it is wrong. Ferrari never chose red. Red was assigned to it by a committee before the company existed. In 1900, motor racing had no sponsors and no liveries. So the organizers of the first international races painted the cars by nation. Britain was given green. France was given blue. Germany was given white and Italy was given red. Rosso Corsa racing red. Enzo Ferrari was two years old. So when he founded his racing team in 1929, the color was simply the one Italy raced in. And he did not build road cars because he loved them. He built them in 1947 to pay for the racing. Every red car sold to a customer was a receipt for a red car on the track. And for the next several decades, when a red car crossed the line first, it was very often his. That is the part that matters because of what red does to the human brain. Red ochre is the oldest pigment humans ever used on cave walls 100,000 years ago. In 1969, two researchers found that across every language on earth after dark and light, the first color a culture names is red. And in 2005, a study in nature found that athletes who wore red at the Olympics, one more fights than athletes who wore blue in identical sports against identical opponents. Red is the oldest dominant signal we have. It means blood and it means whoever is still standing. Ferrari attached that signal to the one thing money cannot fake, which is having one. Then it did something cleverer. Enzo's rule was to always deliver one car fewer than the market wanted. The company still follows it. It builds about as many cars in a year as Ford sells in a single day and it is worth more than Ford. You cannot simply buy the rarest models. You have to be invited. And to be invited, you need to have already owned several. Ferrari can refuse you. It is the only car company where the customer is the one applying. And here is the twist. In the early 90s, about 85% of Ferrari's were red. Today it is closer to 40. Because once the company owned the color, it could charge you extra to decline it. Choosing not red became the way to prove you were not a tourist. Ferrari sells that too. So a man does not want a red car. He wants 70 years of somebody else crossing the line first in exactly that shade and the whole world agreeing to remember it.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.