Motor Racing: A prancing horse, a fading legend: As the Grand Prix season begins in South Africa today Ferrari are looking to recover past glories - and they've brought in an Englishman to help them. Richard Williams reports from Kyalami

ONCE UPON a time, there were two kinds of racing car: the red ones, and the rest.

The red cars, people said, were what it was all about. They had the finest looks, they made the proudest noise, and, through the image of the man who built them, they represented a last link with the heroic age of motor racing.

Everyone wanted to drive the red cars. No matter how glorious a driver's career, it was not considered complete until he had seen his name emblazoned on the scarlet coachwork, next to the yellow shield bearing the image of a prancing black horse. When he sat in that cockpit, it joined him to the spirits of the past, to traditions of courage and chivalry. He wouldn't always win, but when he lost it was expected that he would do so with a flourish, and then he would be loved all the more.

In those days, you couldn't get near the Ferrari pit for the scrum of fans drawn by the mystique. Seeing a Ferrari driver trying to cover the 20 yards from the pit to his team's motorhome after a practice session was like watching Madonna going for a jog in Hyde Park, only with more photographers. Every time the Ferrari team even tested a car, on their own little track next to the famous factory in the Po Valley, a crowd materialised outside the perimeter fence. Even their transporters, returning home from foreign exploits, drew crowds to the factory gates. Ferrari himself, a complicated, mysterious figure devoted to women, opera, cars and endless intrigue, became the object of a secular cult.

All this mystique was worth a lot of money. Once the world had capitulated to the concept of brand-name marketing, that little black horse could be put on anything from coffee mugs to pounds 250,000 sports cars. It was the sort of brand, you might say, that money couldn't buy - except that it did, first in 1969, when Enzo Ferrari sold 50 per cent of the company to Fiat, and then again in the autumn of 1988, when the old man died and Fiat exercised its option to buy a further 40 per cent, leaving a mere tenth of the company in the hands of Ferrari's only surviving son.

Some people thought the old man's death would mean the end: no Ferrari without Ferrari. But for a while his demise seemed only to enhance the appeal. Waiting lists for the cars lengthened, and the value of just about every old Ferrari ever made went through the roof. And when the red cars came first and second in the next grand prix, at Monza, the lasting potency of the legend appeared to be assured.

But in 1993 Ferrari is not what it was. The worldwide slump has cut the demand for luxury cars. Two years ago, Ferrari made 4,700 road cars, a record for the firm. This year's figure will be 3,000, and, like many humbler Italian firms, it has taken advantage of the cassa integrazione - the law by which, in hard times, you can lay your workers off for a week at a time while the state pays their wages.

Worst of all, this weekend in South Africa, at the first grand prix of the Formula One season, there is no crowd around the Ferrari pit. The long lenses are pointed at other cars, other faces. It is two years since Ferrari last won a grand prix; since then designers and drivers have been fired in a steady procession. No longer do the team automatically attract the best pilots: last autumn, Ayrton Senna hardly gave a

second thought to its offer of an astonishing dollars 25m. In the paddock, now, the Ferrari team looks very much like any other mid-table outfit: only as good as its last result. So what went wrong?

'I HAVE to say that the halcyon days of Ferrari were when the old man was alive,' Harvey Postlethwaite said. 'Unfortunately, it would be wrong to say that it's anything like that now.'

The man charged with restoring the fortunes of the Ferrari racing team is a 49-year-old English engineer whose vaguely distracted air and sudden bursts of impatient gesticulation make him resemble the sort of public school master who only has time for the really gifted boys.

Postlethwaite, formerly with March, Hesketh, Tyrrell and Mercedes-Benz, has returned to the Maranello factory - where he was first employed in the early Eighties - as the head of Scuderia Ferrari, the historic title of the Ferrari racing team. He was offered the job last year by Luca Di Montezemolo, the young aristocrat who had himself run the racing team, very successfully, in the mid-Seventies

before being moved on by his relative the Fiat president Gianni Agnelli to a variety of other imperial responsibilities - including, ultimately, the organisation of the 1990 World Cup. If he could make a success of that, Agnelli must have thought, then going back to sort out the mess at Ferrari would be child's play.

But here was Ingenere Postlethwaite, sitting outside the Ferrari pit before practice at Kyalami last week, saying that things ain't what they used to be.

What did he mean? Is life at the Fiat-run Ferrari more, well, corporate?

'Yes.'

Not so much fun?

'No. It isn't'

I told him that a couple of years ago I'd sat in the Ferrari offices at Maranello and listened to Piero Fusaro, Fiat's first presidential nominee after the old man's death, telling me how important it was to keep alive what he called the 'mythos' of Ferrari. Without the myth, he was saying, the company meant nothing. It seemed a justifiable enough view at the time, but later I began to think that if a company lived only on its own myth, then it could have

no future of its own. And when I heard that Montezemolo was back at Maranello, that he'd invited his old colleague Niki Lauda to be an adviser to the team, and that they'd painted a white stripe around the cockpits of the new cars to resemble the models that Lauda drove for Montezemolo almost 20 years ago, I began to think that maybe the myth had taken over. Did Postlethwaite see it as a danger?

'Yes, absolutely. You can have all the ambience and all the 'mythos', whatever words you want to use, but in order to maintain any semblance of credibility, Ferrari must start winning races again. Winning races is the only way to maintain the myth. You can't maintain the myth for the myth's sake.'

Montezemolo's strategy is to divide the construction of the cars between the Maranello engine shop, under Claudio Lombardi, and the design and development department, under John Barnard, the inventive genius who built a controversial technical centre for Ferrari just outside Guildford in the mid-Eighties and, after a period at Benetton, has just returned to create another one, a hundred yards down the

road. Postlethwaite's job is to co-ordinate the work of the two departments, to get the cars built, to supervise the testing, and to run the racing team.

It's a hell of a job, and Postlethwaite clearly feels that the burden of the past is no help in the task of running the sort of lean, flexible operation required if he is to challenge the English garagistes like Frank Williams and Ron Dennis.

'The only thing that worries me is whether the cars are competitive or not. The rest of it's simply a nuisance, quite frankly. It's all hype. As soon as Ferrari is competitive again, all those things will take on a new importance, but at the moment it's extremely difficult to defend anything about Ferrari when you're not qualifying or running among the top teams.'

Many people in recent years have asked how a team able to spend more money than anyone else can do so badly. When I put this to him, Postlethwaite reacted with his most schoolmasterish scorn.

'Who says we can spend more than anyone else?'

That's the general assumption . . .

'Well, most general assumptions

are wrong. No, we haven't got the biggest budget in this paddock. Certainly not now. And we also have costs that are higher than some other teams, because of the way we operate. There are a number of things that are difficult about running the team in Italy. We're cloned off the side of a production-car company, for a start. That's a fact of life. It's something I'd dearly like to change, but I can't. So, for instance, our personnel are managed by the personnel department of a Fiat-run company. That determines our pay structure and our hours of work.' And that, he said, complicates their employment policy. 'It's a question of the type and quality of people we can employ.'

And the number. Ferrari had the wrong people, and too many of them. 'At the low point last year, we had so many people at Maranello that you wouldn't believe it - and we were bringing most of them to the races. That's had to stop. This year's budget is tight. Well, it's enough to be competitive. If we're not competitive, it's not the budget that's the problem. But it has to be spent wisely.'

Are they spending it wisely, though? People say their V12 engine isn't good enough, and their winter testing looked like an expensive disaster, with so many problems afflicting the new active suspension system that the two drivers, Jean Alesi and Gerhard Berger, hardly got in a quick lap between them. Had they learned anything?

'We learned a lot about the active suspension.' A sarcastic pause. 'Or the technical people did. But not much else, I'd say.'

IN THE grand prix paddock, just about everybody has a view about Ferrari's fortunes. Quite a few of them even have first-hand experience.

Here, rolling along in the wheelchair he's driven since an accident ended his career in 1980, is Clay Regazzoni, the Swiss who piloted Ferraris with muscular flamboyance throughout the Seventies. What does he think of the present state of the old Scuderia?

'For sure, they have a lot of problems. They have a lot of people with no idea. Look at McLaren - they can build a new car with a different engine in four months, and today it's at the front. It's not money. Ferrari have more money than anyone. The problem is the men.'

Is Montezemolo the man to solve the problem?

'I don't think so, because when Luca first arrived at Ferrari, Mauro Forghieri had built us a very good car. And still we managed to lose two championships in four years. The car was so competitive that we should have won everything. But in 1974 and 1976 we lost because of the organisation within the team. And something is wrong with the organisation now.'

And here, by contrast, is Niki Lauda, Regazzoni's erstwhile team mate, who won the world championship for Montezemolo and the old man in 1975 and 1977, and is now taking time off from his airline business to advise the team.

'The organisation is fully under control,' Lauda says in his crisp, rapid way. 'The problems? A brand-new car, active ride, complicated to develop. It's just a long technical job to get a complicated system working. We need a lot of software testing.'

Do people, I ask him, expect too much of Ferrari?

'Sure, because it's the most famous racing car and everybody wants to see it winning.'

Well, perhaps. In the days when the cars were made by Modenese craftsmen, sure; in the days of software testing, possibly such sentimentality is out of place.

Other, more cynical observers might reflect that Lauda was one of many drivers to leave the Scuderia in a bad atmosphere, his tenure poisoned by the old man's incurably Machiavellian ways. Regazzoni was another. Going further back, so were Fangio, Phil Hill and John Surtees, three of Ferrari's world champions. More recently, the casualties have included Stefan Johansson, Patrick Tambay, Rene Arnoux, Michele Alboreto and Nigel Mansell. In the past two years, both Alain Prost and Ivan Capelli have been sacked before the end of the season.

The old man died full of years and honours, his manifold hypocrisies conveniently forgotten. But maybe the poison is still in the system. And maybe, whatever anyone does now, there isn't an antidote.

(Photograph omitted)