How Henrique Cisneros revived MOMO

The list of companies and manufacturers involved in racing is long, but the list of those that started as a racing company and became a major global brand is decidedly shorter. One that makes the cut was founded in 1964, when Enzo Ferrari himself commissioned a new, leather-wrapped, small diameter steering wheel for the 158 F1 driven by John Surtees. The inventor and maker of that steering wheel was Gianpiero Moretti.

When Surtees went on to claim the world championship that season, Il Commendatore informed Moretti that henceforth, he would supply the steering wheels for all Ferrari race cars as well as a fair number of the road cars too. So, in 1966, Moretti formed the company to be known as MOMO. The first "MO" representing "MOretti" and the second "MO" for "Monza."

Moretti, who came from a well-to-do Milanese family, had no desire to join the family business. Instead, he preferred to drive racecars, and this in turn helped him craft the products that would be produced under the MOMO banner.

So his life as a racer and company founder were symbiotic and the manifestation of that came through the red, yellow and black MOMO livery that stands alongside others like Martini Racing and Gulf as the most iconic sports car liveries of all time.

Moretti was the epitome of the gentlemen racer. Talented behind the wheel, he also knew his limits and often partnered with professional drivers that were able to find an extra measure of speed needed to win. Outside of the racecar, he was well-known to be gregarious and gracious. His pasta dinners in the paddock became the stuff of legend. When he passed away in 2014 at the age of 71, the tributes to the man, the racer and the company he founded were effusive in their fondness.

Morretti's tenure at the head of the company he founded ended in the mid-1990s. As so often happens when a brand's founder ages and moves on, the new custodians can take the company in directions it was never intended to go, and without its guiding light, the luster on the reputation dulls. Under the control of a variety of investment group owners, just such a thing transpired at MOMO. It became a business and forgot it represented a passion.
Then in 2011, MOMO was purchased by Henrique Cisneros.

"The important thing to know is that MOMO is now back in the hands of racers," says Cisneros during the Pirelli World Challenge Sprint X finale at Circuit of The Americas, in Austin Texas where he just clinched the driver's title in the AM/AM category.
Indeed the parallels between Cisneros and Moretti are uncanny.

Cisneros was born in Venezuela before moving to Miami, Florida at age 13. His great-grandfather founded what is currently known as the Cisneros Corporation in Venezuela in 1929. What began as a material transport business soon diversified into a wide array of businesses that ranged from beverage bottling to broadcast media. Eventually, the company would control various rights to represent brands like Apple, Burger King, Pepsi and others in the Venezuelan market.

Cisneros, like Moretti, was destined to join the family business. Unlike Moretti, he did so, but sports cars and racing were never far from his mind. He grew up a huge fan of both Formula 1 and the German Touring Car Championship (DTM).

When Cisneros got into college, he got his first car, a BMW M3. Immediately he went to work bolting on performance upgrades. He did his first track day at age 19 while attending college in the Washington DC area.

"I started doing track days with the BMW, but pretty soon, I got to the point where I wanted a faster car," says Cisneros. "So, I switched to Porsche 911, which I tuned for even more power. By then, the track day coaches didn't want to drive with me. The car was too fast and too dangerous. So they told me, if I wanted to continue with this, I had to move on to a proper race car."

Together with his brothers, who share his enthusiasm for motorsport, they each agreed to go out and buy a Porsche Cup car with all the proper track-specific safety and performance set up, but still only with the intention of driving at track lapping days. It was all, "just for fun."

It was then that Cisneros made his initial contact with NGT Motorsport, which to this day runs the Ferrari 458 GT3 with which he competes in Pirelli World Challenge. His first track days with the car took place at Sebring International Raceway, and by the end of the weekend he was setting competitive lap times for the car. Under the guidance and encouragement of NGT owner Ramez Wahab, Cisneros entered a Porsche Club of America event, which he won. Then he moved on to Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge competition where he won a class championship in each of his first two seasons.

At the same time he was enjoying racing, Cisneros was also now fully immersed in the family businesses, which included running a brewery in Venezuela. Racing at the Porsche Cup level was now too expensive to simply be a hobby, so he became determined to find a way to combine business and racing. The opportunity presented itself when he got wind that MOMO was up for sale.

"I knew the MOMO brand from when I was watching racing as a kid," recalls Cisneros. "Initially, I went into the purchase with two other partners. Soon after, I realized that this brand that was everywhere when I was growing up was now no where to be found."
It presented a golden opportunity to resuscitate this iconic brand. The deeper Cisneros got involved with the company, the more opportunity he saw with it. Eventually, he agreed with his partners on an amicable buyout of their shares to take full control.

"What started as a hobby became an obsession, with both the company and the racing," says Cisneros.

Now Cisneros was in a position to combine his business acumen with his racing passion. The first thing he saw was that racing, like beer and wine, is a massive category made up of numerous niches. Product and marketing don't necessarily apply across all of the niches, so the strategy for MOMO was to diversify in such a way that R&D, distribution and such could be harnessed across multiple brands that speak the individual niches within motorsport. Thus, other brands with intrinsic motorsport DNA like Weld Racing, CCW, Hyper and most recently Driven Motorsport, among others have come into the MOMO fold.

Today, MOMO is more than just steering wheels and shift knobs. For the motorsport market there's an array of safety apparel in addition to steering wheels and seats. For the road there are wheels and wide range of accessories. Cisneros half-jokingly says he's the head of R&D as he insists on trying everything they make in competition.

He's also now walks in Moretti's footsteps, making the comparison inevitable.

"First of all Gianpiero is a legend in the paddock, first and foremost as a person who was much loved," says Cisneros, noting that Moretti passed away shortly after he bought the company. The two never met, but Moretti rode with Cisneros in spirit at the Rolex 24 as the fifth driver on the car just after his passing. "There's a lot I've learned from studying him, starting with the fact that we are all competitors here, but we are people first. And like him, we've come to own this business because it's a passion, it's what we do, and that's not just me, but everyone in the company. We all have that racer's spirit to make the product better everyday on the track and off."

And that, according to Henrique Cisneros, racer and businessman, is how you bring an icon like MOMO back to the front.