>>PACESETTERS
The Italian Job Franco Cimatti travels full circle to Ferrari headquarters By Neil B. McGahee Photo: Gary Meek
Ferrari. The car is a legend. The job is a dream. But alumnus Franco Cimatti traveled the world and found himself spinning wheels in his career before he returned home and found the dream. "In Italy, Ferrari is on everyone's mind. The newspapers print racing results on the front page like the papers here report football or baseball," says Cimatti, ME 81, who was born in Modena, Italy, the original headquarters of the world-renowned automaker. "When I was just a small boy, I remember my grandfather, Pasquale Bertone, would pack me into the front basket of his bicycle and pedal around a Ferrari test track near our home," Cimatti says. Cimatti, concept design manager for Ferrari, returned to campus this spring as featured speaker at the Georgia Tech Auto Show and brought along some of his handiwork — several Ferraris worth more than $100,000 each. Although young Franco liked the fast, sleek cars, his first love was motorcycles. "Around junior high, I began to read motorcycle magazines," he says, "and I found drawings that showed how engines work. Later I learned mechanical engineers did that and I said, 'That's what I want to do.'" Cimatti's father worked as an agricultural engineer studying pesticide safety issues, a job that
52
carried him around the world. The family moved often, from Modena to Bologna to Milan to Mexico and eventually to the United States. "I was a student at the American School in Mexico when I first heard of Georgia Tech," Cimatti says. "Even though we moved again to Miami, I remembered that a friend's brother said Georgia Tech was one of the best engineering schools in the country. After I graduated from Palmetto High in 1977, I applied and was accepted into the mechanical engineering program." Cimatti graduated in 1981 and earned his master's from MIT a year later. "My parents had moved to England so I joined them and began looking for work, but there were few engineering jobs available," he says. Instead he worked as a substitute teacher at the American School in London. "It wasn't what I wanted to do but I had been a teaching assistant at Tech plus I speak Spanish, German and Italian, so I became a math and foreign languages teacher," he says. "It paid the bills." But the speed bug is hard to ignore and Cimatti continued to search for a job with ties to racing. "I think I hit every racing team in England," he says. "Williams, McLaren, Tyrrel, Brabham — you name a team
Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Summer 2006
and I probably applied there." Disappointed by the results of his job search, Cimatti began thinking about returning to Italy. Lombardini, a small diesel engine manufacturer, offered him an engineering position. It wasn't racing, but it beat teaching, he says. Eight months later, his career was interrupted by a compulsory one-year stint in the Italian military. Cimatti used the time to apply for positions with Italy's automakers — Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Ferrari. "Fiat offered me a job in Turin in the engine testing department so I spent six months there learning production technology," he says. But Ferrari answered his query as well. "I had been applying to Ferrari since I was a junior at Tech," he says. "I was offered a position in the testing department where I would be working with a complete car, not just a piece of the car like shock absorbers or a braking system." It was a dream come true — working for one of the world's premiere automobile companies in the land where he was born. Cimatti's stature in the company grew quickly. He was assigned to test shock absorber dampers on a 412, one of the few high-performance sedans ever made by Ferrari. Next, Cimatti was assigned to evaluate the Testarossa, prob-
ably the most recognized of all Ferraris — think fast red car in "Miami Vice." "That was my first experience with really high speed," he says. "The Testarossa can reach nearly 200 miles per hour and I felt like I was riding a cruise missile." In 1989, he was named chief testing coordinator for two other legendary models — the 348 Spider and the Mondial. "There were many things that had to be changed on the prototypes," he says. "We had to design side-mounted radiators on the 348 and change the Mondial's engine placement from transverse mounting to longitudinal." In 1994, Cimatti was named concept design manager at Ferrari and given the task of creating the 612 Scaglietti, a four-seat, high-speed touring coupe. "I had complete control over every aspect of the design," he says. "This may be the best job in the world," he says. "Working at Ferrari is so exciting. People ask me what is my favorite project and I have to say 'the next one' because doing something new excites me. I'm able to work alone or in small teams rather than as a part of a big committee. "A committee isn't always the most efficient way to work. You can't play a violin with more than two hands." G T