Partly because of the national colours decreed by the sport’s governing body, for example Blue for France, green for Great Britain, but in this case, yellow for Belgium and Brazil, there were many wins for yellow Ferraris. In chronological order, it started with Brazilian privateer, Chico Landi who won several races in his home country in 1951. As the Maranello marque’s cars grew in prestige and popularity in racing, so too did the number of cars it produced and a veritable surge of yellow Ferraris went racing in the early 1960s, especially with Belgian teams, Ecurie Nationale Belge and Ecurie Francorchamps. There was also an officially entered Ferrari Formula 1 car that raced in yellow at the 1961 Belgian Grand Prix. The driver was Olivier Gendebien, who hailed from Brussels and had recently won the Le Mans 24 Hours with the Scuderia. The yellow reflected his nationality and also that of the Belgian Ferrari importer, Jacques Swaters who picked up the team’s costs for this car. Gendebien finished fourth, behind team-mates, Phil Hill, Wolfgang Von Trips and Richie Ginther on a day when Ferrari was totally dominant. Going against the rule of red for Italy, in the Inter-Europe Cup held at Monza on 15 April 1951, Italian privateer Salvatore Ammendola won in a yellow 195 Inter Berlinetta.

The first yellow Ferrari at a motor show and the stripes of the Sixties.

There’s the tale of another yellow Ferrari linked to Fiamma Breschi, the widow of racing driver Luigi Musso. She had suggested he should race in a yellow helmet and, so the story goes, she also suggested to her friend Enzo Ferrari that he display a yellow car at a show and so the 275 GTB was launched at the 1964 Paris show in that colour. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, yellow began to feature on the factory Ferraris. The 312 F1-68 featured two stripes that ran down the length of the sides of the car and on the Sports Prototype 312 P, an off-centre stripe ran from the back to the nose except for the cockpit, with the rear wing also being yellow.

The squares of the Eighties.

Yellow would again be prevalent in the Eighties, featured on team clothing for the mechanics and engineers, who wore black trousers and shoes, with yellow shirts and polo shirts. The colour was also used in the Nineties on just one of the F1 cars to make the two easier to tell apart, a useful aid for the team as well as for spectators. Two yellow squares featured on the front and rear wings of the number 27 car. This solution was no longer needed with the advent of on-board cameras, when one of these would be painted yellow to distinguish the two cars.

Schumacher and the 1000 GP logo.

Michael Schumacher was responsible for the reappearance of yellow at the Scuderia, when he changed his helmet design in 2000, replacing colours of the German flag with red and a large Prancing Horse on a yellow background at the back of his helmet. Proving that this colour is still very much in the Maranello marque’s DNA, was the yellow 488 Challenge as seen in the World Finals at Daytona in 2016. Even more recently, it even featured prominently on the special logo to celebrate the Scuderia’s 1000th Grand Prix, which the SF1000s sported at the Tuscan Grand Prix-Ferrari 1000 at Mugello on 13 September 2020.