Fifty years celebrated in a special way

Reaching the age of 50 is an important milestone in the life of a man, but celebrating it on a plane is not exactly brilliant, especially when it’s a flight from Italy to Japan, which is not exactly a little jaunt. With that in mind, the long standing Scuderia Ferrari Chief Mechanic, Francesco Uguzzoni, decided to wait until he had got to Suzuka before celebrating the special day alongside those he spends a lot of time with, namely his fellow Scuderia colleagues.

They all gathered together this afternoon under the tented hospitality area to raise a glass and tuck into a birthday cake: there was time for a round of applause, a few jokey comments and then our man was back at work overseeing the build-up of the two F2012s to be used by Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa at this race.

“This will be my 260th Grand Prix, but I still love this life,” said “Ugo,” as he is known by all in the Maranello pit garage. “I like the adrenalin of the races, travelling around the world and today, I still can’t see myself doing anything else. At some point or other, I’ll retire, but given the way things are going at the moment, it’s hard to say when…”

“I started with the race team in 1995 and from then on, I’ve always been at the track, apart from a break in 2005 and 2006, when I ran the mechanics on the test team,” recounts Francesco, who was born on 30 September 1962 at Modena. “I joined Ferrari in 1991: at first I was a mechanic at Castelvetro, but then when I transferred to Formigine, I learned that there was the chance of being taken on at Maranello and so I sent in my CV. I was taken on immediately by the Gestione Sportiva as a welder, while my first role at the track was in the bodywork section.”

It’s a classic question on these occasions – what are the best and worst moments of your career? Despite the fact there are no less than 259 chapters to choose from, Uguzzoni is clear on the subject: “The worst was Singapore 2008, the race in which there were problems with the refueling on Felipe’s car. “It was a very difficult moment and I will never stop thanking Ferrari for having supported me and shown confidence in me: it’s not by chance that I still have the same role of supervising the pit stops: and in that respect one can see the difference with the other teams. The best? It’s again linked to a pit-stop, which is always a key moment in a race: my first time on the lollipop was at Spa in 1996, when Michael Schumacher took the second of his 72 wins in Red.”

In fact, Schumacher played a major part in Uguzzoni’s career at the race track, given he was always in the pits in the years in which Maranello took five Drivers’ and six Constructors’ titles. He was also there in the other championship winning years, 2007 and 2008: to bring this tale to a close, there is still something missing. Everyone in the garage knows what that refers to, but out of superstition, no one is saying…