One of the most horrific tragedies in motorsport history occurred in the 1957 Mille Miglia. In the final stretch of the 1,000-mile endurance race across Italy, less than 40 miles from the finish line in Brescia, the Ferrari 335 S driven by the Marquess Alfonso de Portago suffered a front-tyre blowout. The car was sent careering into a telephone pole, over a brook and through a crowd of spectators before bouncing back on to the road, hitting more spectators and finally coming to a stop in a brook on the other side of the road. The accident claimed the lives of the Marquess – whose body was found near the car, severed in half – and his co-driver Edmund Nelson, as well as nine bystanders, of whom five were children. A further 20 spectators were injured.

The consequences, unsurprisingly, were far-reaching. The Mille Miglia was immediately banned by the Italian government, along with all motor racing on public roads in Italy, and Enzo Ferrari, the company’s enigmatic founder, was charged with manslaughter and negligence.

It was not just the state who held him responsible, either. The Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, ran a comment piece denouncing Ferrari as an “Industrial Saturn” – Saturn being the Roman god who devoured his own children. “A modern Saturn become industrial tycoon,” the article read. “He continues to devour his sons, as in the myth, so unfortunately in reality.”

The episode, which is retold in Luca Dal Monte’s definitive biography Enzo Ferrari: Power, Politics and the Making of an Automotive Empire, as well as in the Michael Mann film Ferrari (2023), was a defining moment in the life of “The Old Man” or “Il Commendatore”.

It may also go some way to explaining why Kimi Antonelli became F1’s youngest champion in Mexico last weekend wearing the black overalls of Mercedes rather than the red of Ferrari.

Ferrari’s home-grown problem

It is, after all, a strange fact that in the 70-odd years since that Mille Miglia tragedy, there have been such a small number of Italians who have raced for the marque, and none of them champions.

In the late 1950s and 1960s there were Luigi Musso, Lorenzo Bandini, Giancarlo Baghetti and Ludovico Scarfiotti, who won the 1966 Italian Grand Prix – the last Italian winner of his home grand prix until Antonelli’s triumph in September. But it tended to be foreign drivers who made the bigger impact. Mike Hawthorn (British), Phil Hill (American) and John Surtees (British) all won drivers’ titles for the Prancing Horse.

In the 1970s, again, Ignazio Giunti and Arturo Merzario drove a handful of races for the Scuderia. But it was Niki Lauda (Austrian) and Jody Scheckter (South African) who made the biggest impact, winning three titles between them.

In the 1980s, Michele Alboreto won three grands prix with Ferrari and finished as the 1985 world championship runner-up. But that was as good as it got.

In the 1990s, it was a similar story with Ivan Capelli and Nicola Larini racing for Ferrari in 1992 and 1994. But it was Michael Schumacher, a German, who would go on to become Ferrari’s greatest ever driver, winning five world titles between 2000 and 2004.

Although drivers such as Luca Badoer and Giancarlo Fisichella made a handful of appearances for Ferrari in the 21st century, the trend has continued until today. Ferrari’s most recent world champion was a Finn, Kimi Raikkonen, in 2007. Their biggest stars in recent years have all been foreign: Fernando Alonso, Sebastian Vettel, Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton.

The other tragedy that detached Enzo Ferrari from his drivers emotionally

Why is that? Partly it had to do with Enzo Ferrari all those years ago. Although he was eventually acquitted of the Mille Miglia accident, that tragedy, as well as others in the years leading up to it, had a profound effect on him.

Most notably, in 1955, Ferrari’s great champion driver Alberto Ascari – still the last Italian to win the world title for the Scuderia in 1953 – died in practice at Monza.

A four-hour episode of Acquired, the popular business and tech podcast hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, was published in April in which the hosts described how these years took a toll on Ferrari’s founder.

They recall how Enzo hired the young Ascari, the son of one of his two mentors who died when he was racing for Alfa Romeo at the 1925 French Grand Prix. They also recall how he took him under his wing, treating him almost like a surrogate son. And how, following Ascari’s death, Enzo vowed that he would “never become emotionally close to a driver again”.

The next year, tragedy struck again. Enzo’s son, Dino, who he had been grooming to take over the business, died aged 24 of muscular dystrophy. Again, it led to emotional detachment.

“Enzo has spent 24 years since Dino’s birth keeping him safe,” Gilbert says. “I mean, doing everything that he can control in his worldly power to not be around race cars. I mean, he’s not racing them. He’s trying not to have Dino race them. He’s not meeting the drivers anymore. He’s trying not to get too wrapped up in the lives of the drivers. And yet his son is still taken from him in this horrible illness.”

The podcast claims that in the aftermath of the Mille Miglia crash, a compromise was reached with the Vatican whereby Ferrari was allowed to continue racing “as long as [Enzo Ferrari] agrees to never hire Italian drivers, you know, basically like: ‘You can kill young men as long as you don’t kill our young men.’” It is an agreement that has been maintained in conspiracy theories for decades.

That “ban” did not happen. Ferrari handed drives to plenty of Italians, as the above list shows. But Enzo Ferrari tried for ever after to keep his distance from his drivers, even if he failed in the case of Gilles Villeneuve, whose death in 1982 once again left him grief stricken. Enzo Ferrari died in 1988, at the age of 90, in Maranello.

So why the modern-day problem?

None of which explains why there have not been more Italian drivers representing Ferrari in recent years.

Some believe that is because Ferrari, uniquely, are so big they do not need to run home-grown talents. The brand transcends the sport. Italians will support Ferrari no matter what. It is a national emblem.

But it does not really wash. Of course they would love to have seen Antonelli winning in red. So why have they not produced one down the years. Is it a lack of talent? Were the best Italian drivers of recent decades, such as Riccardo Patrese and Jarno Trulli, simply not good enough to make it at Maranello?

Are there not enough promising young karters coming through in Italy? Is it a funding issue? Or are Ferrari not good enough at identifying, recruiting and developing young local talent? Are they asleep at the wheel?

Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that this is the case. It would have stung Ferrari that the morning after Antonelli’s triumph in Italy, La Gazzetta dello Sport had a prominent dig at Ferrari’s expense. “KIMITICO” ran the paper’s headline, under which they wrote: “Kimi Antonelli is a Formula One world champion. Thanks to his talent, the car and the fact that he isn’t racing for Ferrari.”

The line refers to Ferrari’s shambles in Mexico, where Hamilton and Leclerc clashed, costing the Scuderia a possible race win, as well as to Ferrari passing on Antonelli as a child.

Antonelli’s father, Marco, claimed that Maurizio Arrivabene, the former team principal, turned down his son and Antonelli instead joined the Mercedes junior programme at the age of 11.

Ferrari may have already lost the ‘next Antonelli’

Why did Ferrari miss out? Sources in Italy have told Telegraph Sport that in the early years of the Ferrari Driver Academy (FDA), which was set up in 2009, they “selected guys bringing money”, known as pay drivers.

But that would have long since changed by the time Antonelli was 11. The FDA has still not developed a promising young Italian. It has had success with the late Jules Bianchi, Sergio Pérez, Leclerc and Britain’s Ollie Bearman. But only one of them made it to the works team, and none was Italian.

Already there is consternation in Italy that the “next Antonelli” may have slipped through Ferrari’s fingers as Niccolo Perico, 11, another hotshot, signed earlier this year with Mercedes. Telegraph Sport contacted Marc Gené, a special adviser and mentor to the FDA, to ask what Ferrari was doing to find and recruit the best young Italian talent. But at the time of publishing Ferrari had not given permission for him to talk.

The clamour for Ferrari to sign the actual Antonelli will grow. A ready-made Italian world champion, still only 20, with his best years in front of him. Piero Ferrari, the second and only living son of Enzo Ferrari, and a 10.48 per cent owner of the Ferrari automotive company, has said that he wants it to happen. “I want nothing more than to see Kimi in the red overalls,” he told Swiss outlet Blick this week. “He reminds me of our Niki Lauda at every race!” Luca di Montezemolo, the former president, struck a similar tone, saying he was only “sorry I didn’t see [Antonelli] behind the wheel of the Ferrari” in Mexico.

Valentino Rossi, the MotoGP great and a close friend of Antonelli’s, is sure it will happen at some point, even if he delivered a backhanded compliment by telling Corriere della Sera that Antonelli should stay at Mercedes to win a few championships before heading to Maranello.

“Let him win more world championships, and then it would be great to see him at Ferrari,” Rossi said, adding: “I’m talking about four or five world championships.”

Until then, Ferrari will keep trying to develop one of their own. There are some decent prospects such as Niccolò Maccagnani (born 2010), who claimed multiple victories for Prema Racing in Italian F4 and E4 and is stepping up to Formula Three for 2027. Or Filippo Sala, who is moving up from karting to Spanish Formula 4.

But will they get to the top? Perhaps the most cutting comment of a difficult week for Ferrari came from Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal, who dismissed the idea that Ferrari “missed a trick” with Antonelli.

“It’s not that Ferrari or anyone else let him slip away, as I’ve heard,” the Austrian told Corriere della Sera. “Behind it all is hard work and an extraordinary guy who has repaid the trust with results. This isn’t my victory, but the system’s.

“No one at Mercedes ever doubted Antonelli; we always supported him even when the results weren’t coming,” Wolff said. “If he’d been at Ferrari or Red Bull, there would have been doubts.

“They would never have put him in the best car straight away and would have parked him in a small team, like Bearman. We had a project for Kimi, a schedule.

“Behind this is a nine-year journey between the team and his family: he had the best coaches, the best tools, Formula One testing, his career was entirely financed by us. We’re the only ones to do so.”

Perhaps Ferrari need to involve the Vatican again. Relations between two of Italy’s biggest cultural phenomena have thawed in recent years. In 2005, Ferrari built its 400th and final Enzo supercar specifically as a gift for Pope John Paul II, which he auctioned off for victims of the South Asia tsunami. 

There are, though, reports that Antonelli, a practising Catholic, may soon have an audience with Pope Leo. Maybe His Holiness can convince him to come back to the motherland and help to end a seven-decade-long anomaly for Italy’s greatest sporting export.