THE GODFATHER

AT 27, THIS MAN ENGINEERED THE WORLD'S FIRST SUPERCAR, AND THAT WAS JUST A START.

- BY MIKE DUFF

A. (Previous pages) Dallara's personal Miura sits in the Dallara Academy museum adjacent to the factory and corporate headquarters.

B. Jim Clark and Colin Chapman getting a personal tour of the Miura from Dallara.

C. Giampaolo still serves as president of the company he started. It boasts more than 800 employees.

GIAMPAOLO DALLARA does not behave like a piece of history. The 88-year-old founder and president of the eponymous Italian motorsport business, talking in his office at the company's headquarters, possesses both a genial charm and what is clearly still a sharp mind. Yet the passage of time has left him as one of few remaining links to a very different past, when a single young engineer could wholly change the automotive world.

Dallara got off to a brilliant start in his career, doing aerodynamic and wind-tunnel work for Ferrari before he had even left college in Milan. This led to a full-time job working under the legendary Carlo Chiti starting in 1959. But Dallara soon chafed at the office-based life of a junior engineer, with most of his time spent crunching numbers. “I wanted to go racing,” he remembers. “At Ferrari, you didn’t do that until you had experience.” So he defected to Maserati after barely a year at the Scuderia, despite his father’s efforts—at Enzo’s urging—to talk him out of it.