Enzo, his mistress and their yellow Ferraris

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This lovely Ferrari 250 GTE was seen some 15 years ago in the paddocks of the Japanese circuit of Fuji. With the GTE model being a popular base for replica 250 SWBs, GTOs and TRs, it is always refreshing to see a well-presented survivor of what may well be the most practical of 250s.

That yellow doesn’t look too bad, either, does it? It must be Giallo Fly, the famous paint colour with a very cool name. It made us wonder what, in fact, the name is supposed to mean. Yes, giallo is Italian for yellow, but Fly? We found one source suggesting it could be an acronym in the vein of N.A.R.T. (North American Racing Team) or T.d.F. (Tour de France).

However, that turns out to be not the case, according to others. Another suggestion is that Fly denotes a Modena company of the same name, Fly Studio, which was set up by former Ferrari engineers Giacomo Caliri and Luigi Marmiroli after they left the firm’s works racing team to start on their own. Indeed, there has been a Modena company with that name and run by those men, but it was not established until 1976, and by that time Giallo Fly had been a household name for over a decade.

Ultimately, an autobiography came to our rescue: Fiamma Breschi’s book Il Mio Ferrari. Surprisingly, Breschi was an Italian actress of the 1950s, but she was involved with Scuderia Ferrari since she had a relationship with works driver Luigi Musso. Enzo Ferrari must have felt sorry for her when Musso died behind the wheel of one of his racers in 1958 and he supposedly asked Breschi to help him make his cars more appealing to women, which reputedly brought the two close together. Very close, as ‘evidenced by the hundreds of love letters he wrote in his famous violet ink…’

In Il Mio Ferrari, Breschi wrote, ‘The Commendatore had given me a mandate to deal with the materials and interior fabrics and shades of colours’ and that’s when she created Giallo Fly. This story is said to be verified by the fact that Enzo Ferrari gave her a copy of his book Mes joies terribles (published in English as My Terrible Joys) and wrote in it ‘Il Giallo Fly e arrivato fin qui’: “The Giallo Fly has arrived here.” Unfortunately, it still does not explain where the Fly name comes from, but we do know that it made its début at the 1965 Salon de Paris on a 275 GTB.

Words and pictures: Jeroen Booij

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