Biography|Stefano Domenicali — The Imola Circuit Where a Banker's Son Learned the Paddock

People treat Stefano Domenicali as a London chief executive who arrived fully formed.

He was born in this town on 11 May 1965, the son of a banker, and the first place that bent the life was not an office.

It was this circuit.

Formula One's own corporate biography records the Imola birth and the childhood weekends spent here.

The Athletic later described him walking the three-mile layout whenever the championship comes back, with the school he attended sitting a stone's throw from the track.

As a schoolboy he worked race weekends at Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari: parking cars for teams, checking passes, helping in the paddock and the media centre.

The circuit is public, Grade 1, and still hosts the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix.

This pin is the track, not a private house.

Imola sits about forty kilometres east of Bologna and about eighty kilometres east of the Ferrari factory at Maranello.

The boy who fetched passes at this gate later ran Ferrari's race team, then Lamborghini, then the championship itself.

The sequence starts on this asphalt.

When the circus returns each spring he still walks the lap.

The paddock he once tidied is now the place that introduced him to the people who ran the sport.

Photo: Monia Mascagni, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons