Enzo Ferrari's own account, written after the 1956 death of his son Dino and first published in Italian as Le mie gioie terribili. The English edition, published in 1963 by Hamish Hamilton with a foreword by Stirling Moss, is long on race-day anecdotes and driver assessments but notoriously short on personal disclosure — true to a founder who spent decades cultivating distance and mystique rather than intimacy. The memoir's title captures the fundamental tension of Ferrari's life: the terrible joy of a man who admitted he should never have married because a passion like his could hardly be divided in half, who called racing 'a profession for men who do not wish to die in bed,' and who asked only to be remembered as 'someone who dreamt of becoming Ferrari.'
This memoir is valuable not for its transparency — Ferrari was never transparent — but for what it reveals through its omissions and framing. The title phrase 'my terrible joys' recurs in Founders episode #396, where David Senra distills Ferrari's most important ideas from hundreds of thousands of words written about him, and the memoir is the primary source for many of the lines that define Ferrari's self-mythology: 'I have never considered myself a designer or an inventor, but only one who gets things moving and keeps them running.' For founders, reading the memoir alongside the biographies is an object lesson in a founder carefully constructing his own legend — deciding what to say, what to leave out, and letting silence amplify the myth. It is the closest thing to Ferrari's own voice we have, and that voice is deliberate, controlled, and never accidental.