From its inception in 1927 to its final roar three decades later, the original Mille Miglia was the most prestigious open-road race in Italy. Starting in the north-western city of Brescia, the route stretched south down the calf of the peninsula along the coast of the Adriatic, twisting east over the Apennines to Rome, then north again, back over the mountains before returning to Brescia via Florence and Bologna. At 1000 miles long (hence the name) and staged in early spring, its drivers and navigators often had to contend with snow in the loftier passes, while tearing through town centres, farmland and small villages where, insanely, spectators were known to teem into the roads and scatter as the cars approached.

It was a tempting and often deadly challenge for any competitor – not least a certain Enzo Ferrari – and also Italian motor sport’s most epic and torturous route. Perfect set-piece material, then, for veteran filmmaker Michael Mann’s biographical drama Ferrari. And the ideal analogy for his own long, torturous journey in bringing that drama to the big screen.

Mann first read the script for Ferrari in the early 1990s, around the time he released his blockbusting historical romance The Last of the Mohicans. It was based on a book he’d loved – 1991’s Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine by Brock Yates (who also, interestingly, wrote the screenplays for Burt Reynolds car-comedies Smokey and the Bandit II and The Cannonball Run) – and adapted by British screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin (who had previously sent Minis careening around the streets of Turin in The Italian Job). The screenplay impressed Mann by not simply being a cradle-to-crypt biopic, but a rich character piece tightly focused on a few crucial months in Ferrari’s life. Specifically, four months in 1957, when his company’s ailing fortunes coincided with a domestic meltdown following the death of his 24-year-old son Dino, and his wife Laura’s realisation that he had, for years, been concealing the existence of another child, Piero, born to his mistress Lina Lardi.