Close-up on Flavio Manzoni, Director of Design Ferrari
At the last Paris Motor Show, one of the major stars was the Ferrari Monza, which was presented in two versions, the SP1 single-seater and the SP2 two-seater. Behind these fascinating studies one man stands out, a designer who changed Ferrari’s mindset by giving the company’s in-house studio a leading role, in preference to Pininfarina.
While the majority of Western car makers had progressively given up consulting independent design studios, the collaboration between Ferrari and Pininfarina held up for a long time …
Until the beginning of the new millennium …
The complete exclusivity which Pininfarina enjoyed for so long was called into question when Ferrari Maserati set up its “Concept design & development” department in July 2002: Frank Stephenson was put in charge of this design studio, based in Maranello, working for both Ferrari and Maserati, which were part of the same business unit at the time. In November 2005, Stephenson was replaced by Donato Coco, who came from Citroën, but he stayed for only four years before moving to Lotus. His place was taken by Flavio Manzoni on 1 January 2010.
When he joined Ferrari, Manzoni could draw on extensive experience with volume car makers. Born in Florence on 7 January 1965 and a graduate in architecture from the University of Florence, he began his career with Fiat Auto in 1993 and became head of interior design for Lancia in 1996. Manzoni went on to shuttle to and fro between the two European groups, Fiat and Volkswagen.
He left the Italian group to manage interior design for Seat (part of the Volkswagen group) between 1999 and 2001, then returned to Turin to take responsibility for design at Lancia in November 2001 and at Fiat in March 2004.
On 1 December 2006, Manzoni returned to the Volkswagen group to join Audi. At the height of his powers, he was appointed to head the Volkswagen group’s “Creative Design” unit on 1 March 2007, working with Walter de Silva.
Manzoni arrived in Maranello to finalize the studies for the F12 berlinetta which his predecessor had begun. He set his own designers to work, both on the exterior and interior, putting them in competition with Pininfarina. From this point on, the two teams in Cambiano and Maranello would be in competition with each other for all the models in the range. Let the best designer win …
Gradually however, Ferrari’s studio gained in importance: as it grew and extended its work, it took direct responsibility for several major programmes.
The highly exclusive model simply known as “LaFerrari” marked a turning point in 2013. It was the first car from the marque for which the design selected had been developed in-house.
The stream of new models continued with the 488 GTB and Spider in 2015, the GTC4 Lusso in 2016, the 812 Superfast and the Portofino in 2017 …
Since Manzoni took charge of design, the number of limited series and special-order models has increased greatly. The “Tailormade” department receives and fulfils all the special requests from the company’s most demanding customers. These have included the SP12 EC for Eric Clapton in 2012, the F12 TRS and F60 America in 2014, the F12TdF in 2015, the 458 MM Speciale, the J50 and the SP 275 RW in 2016, the SP38 in 2018 …
The Monza models in turn belong to a programme known as “Icona”, which will be devoted to reviving the icons of the past.
