Starting from his own experience in the automobile sphere, Count Giannino Marzotto maintains that “…progress on motorcars has derived from two quite separate factors. On one side there is courageous intelligence, that is to say on the part of the designers that instead of designing Pontiacs or Cadillacs put the valves at the top when everyone had them at the side or tried out disk brakes instead of drum ones, that is to say ventured into the new with a dose of faith and courage, believing in what they thought and daring to say ‘Let’s go.’ And then, once the car was created, someone was needed to drive it, that is to say someone that had intelligent courage, which is a different thing from courage.
Pure courage is rashness, imbecility: one can go round fastest and then get killed. Instead, intelligent courage says: ‘First I know the means and my limits, and then I interpret to the best what I can do in relation to the objective.’ If, for example, I have to do the Le Mans 24-Hour race, I don’t give a damn about going round fastest, but I am careful not to brake so hard as to lose one-tenth of a millimetre of the braking surface in the drum brakes, which in the twenty-fourth hour can be fundamental. You must have competence, lucidity and discipline.”