He seemed to be well positioned at Fiat, then the leading racing team but his friend Luigi Bazzi who had recently joined Enzo Ferrari at Alfa Romeo knew the ego that blazed inside Vittorio Jano could not be contained at the larger company. After the desultory results of the new Alfa P1, a Fiat copy no less, it was suggested by Bazzi that in order to succeed they needed to go to the source, they needed to kidnap “Jano”. It was a job that the equally ambitious Ferrari, a self-described troublemaker was born to. Yet Jano was not so easily moved, and according to legend he demanded a formal proposal from Alfa Romeo, imperiously dismissing Ferrari by stating that he would “speak to the organ grinder, not the monkey”. To the shock and dismay of his managers at Fiat, Vittorio was soon headed to Alfa Romeo.
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