Anymore, the “challenge” part of the Hemmings Six Degrees of Automotive Separation Challenge has been finding a marque (or pair of marques) suitably obscure, but still with enough connectivity to the rest of the automotive world to make for an interesting exercise. As we’ve noted time and again, the most difficult thing is to find an automotive company not connected in any manner to any other auto company. Thus, we have to take the next logical step: Make the challenges more difficult.
At first glance, connecting Henry Ford and Enzo Ferrari doesn’t seem to be that brain-straining. Both are titans of the industry, with volumes written about them. They’ve worked shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds, no thousands, of men. They could surely be connected in less than half our normal allotment of six degrees.
But here’s the catch: Every connection you make between the two men must have occurred not just within each man’s lifetime, but also in the overlapping time that both men were active in the auto industry. That means every connection must occur between 1919, when Enzo Ferrari went to work for CMN, and September 1945, when Henry Ford handed over the presidency of Ford to his grandson. Think of this hypothetically as Enzo Ferrari sitting on Henry Ford’s deathbed and both men figuring out how their circles converge.
As with our previous Hemmings Six Degrees of Automotive Personalities Separation Challenge, to link these two men, you have to use people whom Henry and Enzo worked directly with (and the people with whom those people directly worked with), rather than simply the automotive companies at which they worked. For this one challenge, you may also include people who served on the same racing team at the same time.