STANDING IN THE FORMULA 1 PADDOCK by the red twin towers of his team's hospitality suites, wearing his red team uniform, his gray-white hair slicked back, a cigarette on his lips, Maurizio Arrivabene looks like a cross between the Marlboro Man and Enzo Ferrari.

It's as if he'd been chosen by a casting agent to be the new director of the Gestione Sportiva and team principal of Ferrari, historically F1's most successful and famous team. So far, the role seems to suit him perfectly, not simply because he looks the part but because he's producing results: Last year, Ferrari failed to win a single race for the first time since 1993 and finished on the podium only twice. By late July this year, more than halfway through the 19-race season, the team had won two races and scored podiums in six others.

So, who is this mysterious 58-year-old from Brescia?

Darren Heath

His official biography is vague. Both Ferrari and Arrivabene's longtime employer, Philip Morris International, offer only the barest details of the nearly four decades he spent as a marketer for the tobacco giant, first in Italy, and then, beginning in 1997, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Most recently, he held the position of vice president of event marketing and motorsport. In this role, he spent nearly as much time with Ferrari as with Philip Morris, no surprise since he's been involved with the Marlboro sponsorship at Ferrari since the late 1980s, a close relationship instrumental in his appointment late last year at the Italian team.

If Ferrari's decline hasn't been easy for F1 fans to witness, it must have been excruciating for Arrivabene and Philip Morris, which was financing a sizable chunk of the team's effort. After winning every constructors' title from 1999 to 2004 and every drivers' title, with Michael Schumacher, from 2000 to 2004, Ferrari went into decline, winning only a single drivers' title (2007, with Kimi Räikkönen) and just two team titles, in 2007 and 2008.

After five consecutive years without a title, two team directors were fired, one at the beginning of the 2014 season and his replacement at the end. Ferrari's longtime president and chairman, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, was also replaced last fall, by Sergio Marchionne, the Italo-Canadian head of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, which owns most of Ferrari. A new era at Ferrari and the Scuderia clearly had arrived.

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"We needed someone who has a deep knowledge not only of Ferrari, but also of the governance of the sport and of its requirements," Marchionne said when he appointed Arrivabene. "Maurizio has a unique ability in this, having been really close to the Scuderia for all these years. Ever so important is his management experience, which he achieved over the years in what is a complex and extremely tight-ruled market. This experience will help him run and motivate the team."

Philip Morris International CEO André Calantzopoulos also threw his weight behind the appointment, issuing a statement describing Arrivabene as "blessed with a creative genius that has led to some of our more important innovations across a wide spectrum of consumer engagement and other marketing activities. Maurizio was also widely and deservedly praised for leading and mentoring countless employees across the company in an exemplary manner."

Arrivabene's creative sense is less admired by Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula 1 promoter, perhaps due to the Italian's publicity stunt during preseason testing in Spain last winter. Protesting Ecclestone's control of paddock passes for team personnel and guests, Arrivabene sat among the paying spectators in the grandstands. The move was popular with the media, as it added a human touch rarely seen in F1's increasingly colorless team principals. But afterward, when an interviewer asked Ecclestone on the official F1 website if he agreed that Arrivabene was "quite a character," he replied, "But only for himself and not for Formula 1."

Nevertheless, it was precisely for his experience working with Ecclestone and the other team principals that Marchionne hired Arrivabene. He also has been a member of the F1 Commission, a group of representatives from the series that shapes Formula 1's future, since 2010.

"As a member of the F1 Commission, he clearly sees the challenges which lie ahead of us," said Marchionne, who is also on the board of Philip Morris. "He has been a constant source of new ideas to shape up a new Formula 1."

The responsibility Marchionne has given Arrivabene cannot be overstated. Ferrari is a national treasure in Italy. When the team wins on Sunday, Ferrari road cars fill the streets on Monday. The national media lambaste any failings, publishing even the smallest rumors and gossip, and celebrate the victories. Ferrari is the only team that has raced in every season since the F1 championship began in 1950. Without Ferrari, Formula 1 loses much of its luster; without Formula 1, Ferrari loses much of its mystique. Although Ferrari has two victories this year, at press time, the Mercedes team had claimed the rest. Arrivabene still has to prove that he is capable of leaping from the low-profile job of marketing cigarettes to successfully running a racing team with more than 700 members over the long term.

The soft-spoken Arrivabene seems keenly aware of this fact. In an interview during the Canadian Grand Prix weekend in June, he played up his long connection with and affection for Ferrari. With a sparkle in his eye and a ready giggle, he explained that his association with the team goes back to his first encounter with "the old man," Enzo Ferrari, not long before he died in 1988 at 90.

Arrivabene, who was still with Philip Morris in Italy at that time, was about to be assigned to work directly with the Ferrari team, but first his boss had to take him to Maranello to meet Enzo Ferrari for approval. As he waited outside Enzo's house on the grounds of the Fiorano test track, he was so fascinated with the Formula 1 car mechanics were pushing out of a garage that he paid no attention to movement in the window overhead—Ferrari looking out.

"Suddenly, my boss came out and said, you're fine," recalls Arrivabene. "And I said, okay, but he didn't meet me. And he said, here's the story: I went in, Mr. Ferrari turned his head.

"The guy is okay."

"And I said, but you didn't meet him."

"And Mr. Ferrari said, yeah, but I was looking at how he was looking at my car."

That passion for F1 cars came from Arrivabene's father, who would escape important Sunday family get-togethers to find a television to watch the grand prix. "It was always in our family DNA," Arrivabene said. "Even if the television was in black and white, I was looking at only one color: red."

Arrivabene readily admits that Ferrari was always his preferred client at Philip Morris, even when his responsibilities also included BMS Scuderia Italia, a Brescia-based team that raced in Formula 1 from 1988 to 1993. Through his associations with both teams, he became close to drivers—including Ivan Capelli, Andrea de Cesaris, Alex Caffi, Gerhard Berger, Eddie Irvine, and later, Michael Schumacher, Rubens Barrichello, and Felipe Massa—as well as team personnel, from mechanics to directors. He even met his future wife, Stefania Bocchi, at the track. She is still a Ferrari press officer today.

These longtime relationships were important when he became the Ferrari team boss. Earlier this year, while dining at Montana, a Maranello restaurant popular with Ferrari executives and racing staff, Arrivabene learned just how important.

Darren Heath

"One evening, the owner, Mamma Rossella, she looked at me very seriously, and she said: 'You know, most of the guys, when they come here to eat before returning to the racing department, they told me that 50 percent of them were ready to resign, or to ask to go to the production side. But when they heard your name, everybody said, no, no, Maurizio is coming, we will stay.' "

When he arrived at the factory last December, he found a team mired in a morose and defeatist atmosphere. As in its previous down period, in the 1980s and 1990s, when it went two decades without a drivers' title, Ferrari had become a nest of internal bickering and backstabbing, with everyone looking to protect their own turf.

"Guys, what's going on here?" Arrivabene recalls asking. "The first thing I want to tell you—and I'm not pointing the finger at anyone—is that if we are going to win, we are going to win together. If we are going to lose, we are going to lose together. And I told them, the first person responsible for an eventual disaster is me, and the first one responsible for a victory is you.

"I also told them that I didn't want to hear any more that 'It's the fault of the engine,' or 'It's the fault of the chassis,' or 'It's the fault of the aero.' If we fail, we fail together. And suddenly, I realized that the flame was taking life again. And now it's here. We are all going in the same direction."

Results came quickly, with a win in March at the Malaysian Grand Prix, the second race of the season, by four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel, previously with the Red Bull team. Arrivabene told me then that the victory, paradoxically, was practically too soon, lifting expectations too high. He was right. There would be no more victories for months, although the team had regular podiums and a solid hold on second place in the championship.

The key to the transformation and continued development was making sure the team worked as one and did not fall apart into factions as in the past. That, he said, would come through strong leadership.

"To be a leader, you have to feel it, you have to be recognized by the people you are working with," he said. "If you turn your head and you look back and you find that all the people are following you closely, not doing things behind your back, but being with you, then they are recognizing your leadership."

Darren Heath

A second victory finally came at the end of July, at the Hungarian Grand Prix, when both Vettel and teammate Räikkönen (who returned to the Scuderia in 2014 after several years away) leaped past the Mercedes drivers at the start of the race, with Vettel holding the lead until the checkered flag. Räikkönen might have been able to take second place, but his car eventually broke down and did not finish the race.

It was a profoundly important victory for Ferrari but one with an asterisk: The Hungaroring circuit doesn't require as much engine power as most F1 tracks, and engine power is precisely what Ferrari has been lacking since the advent last year of downsized, hybrid engines. Hungary, therefore, was not a conclusive indication that Ferrari now has what it takes to beat Mercedes regularly.

No one knows this better than Arrivabene.

"We have a process in place, and compared with last year, we are gaining a lot on the engine side," Arrivabene said. "For Ferrari, the engine is very, very important. So we have our plan—without rushing—to continue improving the engine, and step by step to adapt all of the aero, according to the engine."

Ferrari is the only team that has raced in every season since the F1 championship began in 1950. Without Ferrari, Formula 1 loses much of its luster; without Formula 1, Ferrari loses much of its mystique.

"You have to make sure you are creating efficiency," he added. "Because when you have too many tools, sometimes it is easy—especially for engineers, because they like experimentation—to go off of the stage."

In fact, much of this year's success is thanks to James Allison, the team's technical director since the end of 2013. He and his technical team had already begun designing the new car before Arrivabene arrived, making several key changes in the layout of the oil tank, gearbox, and exhaust that have made better use of the new rules than last year's car did. Allison and his team also figured out how to reduce premature wear on the Pirelli tires, which had defeated them in the past.

When I asked Arrivabene how he expected to run a racing team without any engineering experience of his own, he scoffed, telling me that in his more than 25 years in the series, he had seen many team principals who were trying to look like engineers and were not.

"Or they sometimes talked like engineers without knowing what they were talking about," he said. "I think in Formula 1, a team principal needs first of all to be a manager."

Darren Heath

The last great manager of the Ferrari team was Jean Todt, a Frenchman, who held the job during the period of the Scuderia's greatest success, with Schumacher and a largely non-Italian staff of directors. That, of course, is another particularity of the Arrivabene reign—he's the third consecutive Italian team principal since Todt, after Stefano Domenicali (2008 to 2014) and Marco Mattiacci (2014). One wonders if it's a disadvantage to be Italian in this highly stressful, highly visible job in Italy, but Arrivabene counters that his years working outside Italy have given him a different perspective.

"The advantage is that you bring a mentality that is a bit more open, a bit broader," Arrivabene said. "Being Italian, you really understand the conversations happening at all levels on the team. Being Italian, or being an Italian with experience from another company outside of Italy," he added, "you can provide the passion that you need when working for Ferrari but at the same time the pragmatism, the working experience, that you've gained from your full professional life."

As for a title?

"I know how to get there, but I don't know when we will get there."





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