At Sputtering Ferrari, Shake

At the Ferrari headquarters in Maranello, Italy, a few miles outside Modena, there is much to remind a visitor of the guiding principle set down by the company's founder, Enzo Ferrari, in the years after World War II. Ferrari decreed that the main business of his company would be racing, primarily in Formula One, and that success on the track would trump all else, including building and selling the production cars that have become icons of style and performance over the past 60 years that seemed to challenge the ethos set by the company's founder.

But the question now is whether that tradition - selling road cars to support the racing operations, rather than using the racetrack as a shop window to promote road car sales - will survive at Ferrari under the new, more hard-edge corporate era that seemed to be heralded this week after an inelegant management shakeup.

The dismissal last week of Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, 67, a protégé of Ferrari's who has run the company since 1991, points to a future in which Ferrari will be folded more conclusively into the corporate mammoth of its parent company, Fiat Chrysler, just as Fiat Chrysler opens itself up to increased market pressures with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange, scheduled for Oct. 13.

Statements by the new Ferrari chairman, Sergio Marchionne, who is adding the Ferrari duties to his role as chief executive of Fiat Chrysler, have suggested that Ferrari will most likely be shorn of some of the go-it-alone idiosyncrasies that have survived since the cantankerous founder died at age 90 in 1988.The takeover by the Italian-born, Canadian-educated Marchionne, 62, also will mark the moment when Ferrari's fortunes pass, for the first time, into the hands of somebody who is not a pedigreed veteran of the company's Formula One operations.

That pedigree has been inescapable in the 23 years di Montezemolo has been in charge. Visitors to his office at Maranello have passed down a corridor hung with photographs of Ferrari's racing triumphs, some of them achieved when di Montezemolo was the Formula One team manager in the 1970s. As chairman, di Montezemolo demonstrated his commercial prowess by guiding the company to its most profitable years as a road car manufacturer, with sales (6,922 cars, a third of them in the United States, in 2013) and profits ($318 million) now at multiples of what they were when Enzo Ferrari died.

But the commercial success has coincided with more patchy results in the company's racing operation. In the Michael Schumacher years, a multinational team of engineers, designers and racing team principals assembled by di Montezemolo delivered five consecutive drivers' championships from 2000 and 2004, a record not even Ferrari himself could match. Overall, 118 of Ferrari's 221 Grand Prix wins have been achieved under di Montezemolo's chairmanship.

But the glory years have been followed with one of the worst chapters in Ferrari's racing history. The team has not won a driver's championship since Kimi Raikonnen's sliver-thin triumph in 2007, or a manufacturer's championship since 2008. Ferrari had only two wins in the 19 races in 2013, and none in the 13 run so far this year.

The urbane di Montezemolo has tried in vain to turn the team around. Last year he threatened to fire the Spanish driver Fernando Alonso after Alonso publicly belittled the cars Ferrari had prepared for him, and this season he brought back Raikonnen and replaced the longtime team manager, Stefano Domenicali, and the head of its engine department, Luca Marmorini, after Ferrari's hybrid V-6 turbo engines were woefully outclassed by those produced by Mercedes-Benz, which has won 10 of this year's 13 races.

But none of the moves were enough to save di Montezemolo in the face of continuing failure on the track. After Ferrari failed again at last weekend's Italian Grand Prix, with Alonso retiring in a plume of engine smoke and Raikonnen's car finishing ninth, Marchionne told reporters that it was 'absolutely nonnegotiable' that Ferrari should win Formula One races and that the team's track successes were essential to the marketing plans of the Fiat Chrysler group.

On Wednesday, the guillotine dropped. Di Montezemolo, describing the decision as 'the end of an era,' accepted a $35 million severance package and said in a statement that he considered it appropriate that Marchionne should take the lead at Ferrari at a time when Fiat Chrysler was preparing to go public with its listing in New York.

What all this portends for Ferrari and its racing operations is unclear. Di Montezemolo had said that he favored capping Ferrari production at 7,000 cars a year, to protect the brand's exclusivity. That approach that has led to a two-year waiting list for Ferrari's models in the United States. Marchionne has spoken of increasing output to 10,000 cars a year. That basic shift in ethos could eventually affect the Formula One team.

According to Corriere della Sera, Italy's most influential newspaper, di Montezemolo has voiced fears that Ferrari's future would be sacrificed to the demands of mass manufacturing, American style. 'Ferrari is now American,' the paper reported him as having told friends. Others who know him have said that he fears that Ferrari, once fully integrated with Fiat Chrysler, will find the wings of its racing team clipped, with corporate concerns about profit coming before the freewheeling pursuit of engineering innovation.

Marchionne has responded by saying he wants Ferrari to succeed on the track, and he has cited the company's failures in Formula One as the primary reason for di Montezemolo's dismissal. But whatever personnel changes lie in store for the team, it seems clear that Ferrari will henceforth have to conform to Fiat Chrysler's corporate playbook, and that the accounting department's blue pencil may hover over the Formula One team, which outspends all its competitors with an 800-man work force - nearly a third of the Ferrari payroll - and a budget that is said to run to nearly $500 million annually, close to two years of Ferrari profits.

In an interview last month with the British magazine Autosport, the new team manager, Marco Mattiacci, who, like Marchionne, has a commercial background and no previous experience in Formula One, said that his vision for Ferrari was that success on the track would come only if it broke abruptly with its past. He gave few particulars, but he sounded an ominous hint that those who pined for the old ways would not last.

'We need a cultural change,' he said. 'To go back to the top, we need discontinuity.'