The Maserati brothers — Alfieri (1887–1932), Bindo (1883–1980), Carlo (1881–1910), Ettore (1894–1990), and Ernesto (1898–1975) — were involved with automobiles from the earliest years of the twentieth century. Alfieri, Bindo, and Ernesto built 2-litre Grand Prix cars for the Diatto company in Turin. When Diatto suspended its racing programme in 1926 due to debt, the brothers struck out under their own name, founding the Maserati marque in Bologna.
The company's trident logo, designed by Mario Maserati — the only brother who pursued an artistic rather than racing career — drew its inspiration from Neptune's trident as depicted in the Fountain of Neptune in Bologna's Piazza Maggiore. The symbol was adopted at the suggestion of family friend Marquis Diego de Sterlich and has remained Maserati's emblem ever since.
The first Maserati-branded car was the 1926 Tipo 26, derived from the Diatto 30 Sport and fitted with a new 1.5-litre inline-eight engine producing 120 horsepower. It made its racing debut at the 1926 Targa Florio, driven by Alfieri Maserati, taking a class victory and ninth place overall — a promising debut for the fledgling marque.
In the years that followed, Maserati built race cars with four, six, eight, and sixteen cylinders, including the extraordinary Maserati Tipo V4, which mounted two straight-eight engines parallel to one another to create a 16-cylinder unit. In 1929 at the Tripoli Grand Prix, this car — driven by Borzacchini — claimed Maserati's first significant international victory and set a new world speed record on the Cremona 10 km stretch at 247.933 km/h.
Further successes came at the 1928 Coppa dell'Etna, cementing the marque's reputation as a genuine challenger to the established Italian and French constructors.
In 1932, Alfieri Maserati died from injuries sustained in a racing accident five years earlier. His loss was a severe blow, but his brothers Bindo, Ettore, and Ernesto kept the firm operating. Ernesto stepped back from his own racing career to manage the company's technical department alongside Ettore.
Throughout the early 1930s, Maserati continued to develop competitive machinery, fielding cars in the major European Grand Prix events and building a reputation for powerful, if sometimes fragile, racing cars capable of fighting the dominant German teams of Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz.
In 1937, the remaining Maserati brothers sold their shares to Adolfo Orsi, a Modena-based industrialist. Orsi moved the company headquarters to Modena in 1939 — close to his steelworks and spark plug factory — where it has remained to this day. The brothers stayed on for a further ten years in engineering roles under the new ownership.
The most remarkable chapters of Maserati's prewar competition record came at the Indianapolis 500. In back-to-back victories in 1939 and 1940, Wilbur Shaw drove a Maserati 8CTF — known as the "Boyle Special" — to wins at the Brickyard, making Maserati the only Italian manufacturer ever to win that race. The 8CTF was a masterpiece of prewar engineering: a supercharged straight-eight of some 3-litre displacement capable of sustaining the high-speed oval demands of Indianapolis across five hundred miles.
The prewar Maserati years established an identity the company would draw on for decades: an Italian racing marque built on family craftsmanship, with an instinct for high-revving multi-cylinder engines and willingness to challenge much better-funded rivals. When the Maserati brothers' ten-year contract with Orsi expired in the late 1940s, they departed to form their own company, O.S.C.A., taking with them engineering knowledge forged across twenty years of competition. The trident badge and the Indianapolis legacy they left behind became the foundation of one of motorsport's most enduring names.