Scarfiotti was born in Turin on 18 October 1933. His grandfather was Lodovico Scarfiotti, co-founder and first president of Fiat, one of the nine founders of the company. This distinguished automotive heritage shaped his relationship with Italian motor sport from an early age.
Scarfiotti made his name in endurance and sports car racing with Ferrari from 1960 onwards. In October 1962 he finished third in the 1000 Kilometres de Paris alongside Colin Davis. The following summer, paired with Lorenzo Bandini in a Ferrari 250 P, he won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June 1963, with the car averaging 117.99 mph over 2,832 miles to give Ferrari its fourth consecutive Le Mans victory. The same year he won the 12 Hours of Sebring.
In 1965, Scarfiotti shared a Ferrari 330 P2 Spyder with John Surtees to win the 1000 km Nürburgring, leading all 44 laps at an average of 90.46 mph. The following year he drove a Dino 206 S with Bandini to second place in the same race, behind the Chaparral that debuted the automatic transmission in European competition.
The departure of John Surtees from Ferrari during the 1966 Le Mans race — precipitated by Ferrari's decision to replace Surtees with Scarfiotti — marked a turning point in the team's dynamics. Scarfiotti retired that race after 123 laps.
In 1967, partnered with Mike Parkes in a Ferrari P4, he took second at the 24 Hours of Daytona behind the sister P4 of Bandini and Chris Amon, and repeated that result at the Monza 1000 km. The pair also finished second at Le Mans in 1967, this time behind the Ford Mark IV of A.J. Foyt and Dan Gurney. After the death of Bandini and the career-ending accident of Parkes at Spa, Ferrari withdrew from the World Sportscar Championship for 1968 in protest at the new engine regulations. Scarfiotti then joined Porsche for hillclimbing, having previously won the sports car class of the European Hillclimb Championship in 1962 and 1965.
Enzo Ferrari recruited Scarfiotti to the Formula One team for 1963 alongside Surtees, Willy Mairesse, Bandini, and Nino Vaccarella. Scarfiotti's debut came at the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, where he finished sixth. His appearances remained sporadic over the following seasons, including a fifth place in the non-championship 1965 Syracuse Grand Prix.
His defining Formula One moment came at the 1966 Italian Grand Prix at Monza, where he drove his Ferrari to victory at a track record speed of 136.7 mph. He was the first Italian in fifteen years to win the race on home soil and, as of the end of the 2024 Formula One season, he remains the last Italian to have done so.
After Bandini's death in Monaco in 1967, Scarfiotti and Parkes shared a dramatic dead heat in the non-championship Syracuse Grand Prix, both clocked at 113.65 mph after 191.2 miles. At the Dutch and Belgian Grands Prix that year, Ferrari entered a three-car effort but both Scarfiotti and Parkes were classified well behind Chris Amon. At his home race in Monza, Scarfiotti drove for Dan Gurney's Eagle team with a Weslake V12 engine; it failed early.
With Ferrari signing Jacky Ickx and Amon for 1968, Scarfiotti joined the Cooper team. He finished third in the 1968 Spanish Grand Prix at Jarama and fourth at the Monaco Grand Prix in what proved to be his final Formula One appearance — a race notable for mechanical failures eliminating eleven of the sixteen starters.
On 8 June 1968, Scarfiotti was competing in a hillclimbing event on the Roßfeldhöhenringstraße near Berchtesgaden in the German Alps when his Porsche 910 veered abruptly off the course during practice and catapulted ten metres down a tree-covered slope. The car became lodged in the trees and Scarfiotti was thrown from the cockpit, found injured approximately fifty metres away. He died in an ambulance from multiple fractures. Porsche team manager Huschke von Hanstein noted that in eighteen years running the team, he had never previously been associated with a fatal accident.
Scarfiotti was the third Grand Prix driver to die in 1968, following Jim Clark and Mike Spence. He was survived by his wife Ida Benignetti and two children from a previous relationship.
Scarfiotti's 1966 Italian Grand Prix victory remains a landmark in Italian motor sport, achieved at a track record pace that symbolised the prestige of Ferrari at Monza in front of an enthusiastic home crowd. His endurance record — Le Mans, Sebring, multiple Nürburgring campaigns — established him as one of the most capable sports car drivers of the mid-1960s Ferrari era, even if his Formula One career remained largely in the shadow of his team-mates.