F1 Fanatic

The ‘F2012 was a dog of a car and Fernando was performing miracles’ claim is only true for Melbourne and the first couple of races, in my eyes. Perez should’ve won in Malaysia, but the Ferrari was clearly quick in the wet too. Alonso was incredibly consistent all year, but like in India and Korea, when you’re less than 10 seconds behind Vettel and the Red Bull at the end of a 300km Grand Prix, your car is a good car.

It’s Alonso who said that with a “slightly slower” car he would have been champion, and with an equal car, early champion…

The problem is that everyone takes qualifying pace as THE reflection of a car’s pace, and when that then also hands them a stick to beat their unfavorite drivers with, people are quick to drop all context.

In Sebastian and Mark, we have two of the best qualifiers on the grid, in a car that is completely designed to be quick in qualifying, so much so that it has to compete with the HRTs and Marussia’s over top speed. So is it really surprising to often see the Red Bulls further near the front?

Is it then also really surprising that their race pace is often not as good, especially with a car which becomes handicapped when other cars are near it? Is it then also a surprise that the Ferrari’s, who seem to cruise past almost everyone on the straight, do better in races? Couple that with a bulletproof reliability on the side of the Italians and it pretty much evens out.

It’s all about context.
If you just want a stick to beat Vettel or a golden plate to serve Alonso on, then you can just ignore context and create your own version of reality in which the Ferrari is a dog.
If however you care about a fair evaluation, look at the pro’s and cons of the cars and the characteristics, you will find that while very different, they are both very championship-potential cars in the hands of great drivers. And great drivers are who drove them.

I don’t think the Ferrari has ever been a bad car – not during pre-season testing, not at the beginning of the season and certainly not in the second half of the season. I made a list of reasons why people thought the F2012 was a “dog of a car”:

- Slow qualifying pace: the F2012 typically finished better than it qualified. This is simply the nature of the, likewise the RB7 (last year’s Red Bull) was a good qualifier. People generally think that a car’s qualifying pace is a direct representation of a car’s race pace, but in fact this couldn’t be less accurate. A thing that adds to this is that Fernando Alonso is generally believed to not be the best qualifier in the field. Also, I think that at the start of the season, the ‘rumour’ that the Ferrari was a bad car was ‘confirmed’ because both drivers didn’t make it into Q3 in Melbourne. This was actually due to a spin by Alonso, else he would have probably made it through to Q3. But apparently this was enough for some to keep the sentence “the F2012 is a dog of a car” in mind for the rest of the season.

- Exagaration claims by team members: Fernando Alonso, Felipe Massa, Stefano Domenicali and Luca di Montezemelo have all claimed in the media (both pre-season and during the season) that the Ferrari was ‘a lot’ slower than the rest of the field. I think that you cannot base your opinion about the F2012 purely on team members – that’s where journalists come in. And as far as I know, no respected F1 technical journalist has ever branded the F2012 as a ‘slow’ car. I can’t help but wonder how a slow car could be quickest on the last day of pre-season testing.

- Competitive field: the midfield has tightened up a lot in 2012. This resulted in some exciting and bizar races – 5 different constructors winning in 5 consecutive races. In other words: the standard deviation has decreased. And if a team build a car in 2012 with a gap to the quickest car that 10 years ago would have been good for 2nd place in the constructors’, then it would only be good for 5th or so. So… relatively it wasn’t a masterpiece, but absolute it is a fine car.

- Uncompetitive Massa: F1 is a team sport, and if you want to look at how good a car really is, you don’t only look at the fastest of their two drivers. One cannot deny that Massa was epically slow in the first part of the season. And if you take the average of the two drivers, then you end up with an average that is below the true car’s pace (even if you reason that Alonso is some sort of miracle driver) again further stimulating the before mentioned illusion.

So, I’m not claiming that the Ferrari wasn’t slower than, for instance, the Red Bull and the McLaren at the start of the season. What I’m saying is that the F2012 is often categorized as being slower than it actually is. The result of this is that many people think that Alonso has performed superhuman this season. And this reasoning has been bugging me all season long.

It wasnt a dog, or still born or anything extreme. It was just a car that wasnt as quick out the box as the Redbull or Mclaren. By the time Ferrari was up to speed, it was the 3rd fastest car on the grid 90% of the tracks. But we’re not comparing oranges & apples here, the difference is less then the blink of an eye in speed.

Effectively, the car was only really a dog for 4 races – and in one of them, the wet, coupled with the car’s natural affinity for water – made it more of a hound than a dog

More of a Trout really ;)

I don’t think the Ferrari was a dog of a car at all. Maybe it wasn’t the best car, but it gave Fernando a chance to fight for the title. He wasn’t going to win the championship in outright pace, but given the reliability it had it was quite the vehicle.

Now a Caterham is a dog of a car, but to be honest this season was pretty good in terms of car performance. Sauber, Williams, and Force India each had something good about them.

Yeah but Ferrari alway’s had good race pace it was just in qualifying that the Ferrari was at it’s weakest point. I agree with @dpod he might not of had the best car at any point of the season but he had the best reliability of any car besides Kimi Raikkonen’s Lotus E20.