What Does the Horse on the Ferrari Logo Mean?

Francesco Baracca (1888–1918) was Italy's top fighter ace of World War I. He painted a black prancing horse on the side of his aircraft, and the emblem became linked to his name. He was killed in 1918, five years before the encounter that put the horse on the road to Maranello.

The link between the two men comes from Enzo Ferrari himself. He said that after his 1923 win at Ravenna he met Baracca's parents, who told him to put their son's horse on his cars because it would bring him luck. Ferrari did not use the emblem straight away. It first appeared on cars entered by his team Scuderia Ferrari at the 1932 Spa 24 Hours, on a pair of Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 Spiders.

The background is not decoration. Enzo Ferrari described the canary yellow as the color of Modena, the town where he was born and where his racing team was based before the factory moved to Maranello in 1943. A thin black outline with rounded corners frames the finished rectangle.

The Italian tricolor on top marks the brand as Italian. On the shield version it sits above the horse, and on the rectangle it forms the band across the top.

The horse comes in two layouts. The shield is the original racing form, with the tricolor above the horse and the initials SF below it. SF stands for Scuderia Ferrari, the racing team Enzo Ferrari founded in 1929. Scuderia is Italian for a stable of racing horses.

The rectangle replaces the initials with the word Ferrari in a band along the bottom. It debuted on the 125 S of 1947, the first car to carry the Ferrari name, and it is the badge on the company's road cars. The horse itself has been redrawn many times, but the layout has stayed consistent.

A black rearing horse on yellow also appears on another famous badge, and the two are unrelated. The horse in the Porsche crest is the steed from the coat of arms of Stuttgart, a city that grew out of a stud farm. Ferrari's horse comes from a fighter pilot's emblem. The two badges have different histories and different layouts, so they only look alike at a glance.

Ferruccio Lamborghini founded his car company in 1963 to rival Ferrari and chose a raging bull as his emblem after a visit to a Spanish bull ranch in 1962. The animal choice is a different story, and the Lamborghini page covers it.