Whatever the 1923 Italian term was for, ‘On your bike, son,’ 25-year-old Enzo Ferrari surely uttered it as the carabiniere walked away empty-handed. The officer had arrived at Alfa Romeo’s Milan factory earlier that autumn day with legal papers that allowed him, on behalf of Fiat, to search the offices of Alfa’s new designer Vittorio Jano. He was looking for racing car blueprints that Jano might have ‘forgotten’ to leave at Fiat’s Lingotto factory in Turin, when he’d recently left their employ. When that search proved fruitless so it then moved to Jano’s house – and again nothing was found.

It was Ferrari who had tempted Jano into defecting from Fiat, the same Fiat that had told a desperate Enzo just four years earlier that it couldn’t afford to give jobs to every war veteran that walked into their offices off the street, letter of introduction from his commanding officer or no. Ferrari, his father and brother recently deceased, feeling totally alone and now apparently without prospects, later described how he had walked over the road to Valentino Park that day, brushed the snow off a bench there, sat down – and wept.

With the benefit of detachment and hindsight, it’s easy to see Fiat’s points, both in 1919 and ’23. At the cessation of the war there was rather more labour available than there was space in the factories, and it would have been difficult to know to what use to put a mule-shoer anyway. While in ’23 they had already been the victims of head-hunting, Fiat’s best technical brains – the men who had conceived the fabulous epoch-making series of grand prix cars that left the rest trailing in their dust – being poached with bags of gold.