F1 Fanatic

I think a good shake up of the team is required and luckily Luca Di Montezemolo won’t hesitate to do it. There just seems to be no innovation from Ferrari. Whilst other teams are coming up with ground breaking ideas, Ferrari just seem to tag along and rely on a late season push.

Do you agree that Ferrari’s great reputation and dominance days are over?

i don’t understand how their reputation could be “over” and their last period of dominance ended nearly a decade ago.

it takes more than kicking a man while he’s down for a quality troll thread. i score this 1/10.

No team will dominate forever. Ferrari always have money and teams will make mistakes.

Right now the best cars seem to be McLaren, Mercedes and Lotus. Hard to judge if Red Bull have a strong enough car.

Ferrari might have a bad 2012 but don’t expect them to be like that in 2013

I don’t think the fact that you have a grudge against a particular team is the best reason to create a forum thread.

Ferrari need to send some Mafioso’s to pay a visit to Adrian Newey and make him an offer he cant refuse. :D

Keith’s comment summed it up perfectly.

Read the history of F1, Ferrari will always ebb and flow like the tide, but they will always be there. And as long as they are there, they will find a way back to the top.

Their current issue isn’t so much leadership as it is a deep and prolonged struggle with the 2009-2013 aerodynamics. Even after Schumacher left, they were the best team of 2007-2008, taking 18 wins between Kimi and Massa.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say their reputation is done for. Even if they were at the back of the grid, the Ferrari name would still command some respect.

However, I would say that they have put too much faith in it. This really showed itself when Massa had his accident, and the best candidate to replace him was Luca Badoer. There was a time when Ferrari could command any driver’s loyalty – they’d snap their fingers and half a dozen drivers would try to pounce on an open position. But Ferrari got caught out by the era of the driver development programme. Before Red Bull arrived, Ferrari would snatch Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton up in an instant. But now they’re forced to watch on as two of the best drivers in the sport are off winning races and championships for someone else. And Ferrari know that they will only get Hamilton or Vettel once their current teams are done with them. They really missed the boat, assuming that the best drivers would always want to race for them. While they have an excellent driver in Alonso, their hubris has meant that they don’t have the best line-up. Worse, the F2012 looks practically undriveable at times – Alonso only finished fith because he’s Alonso – so if they were going to replace Massa for Malaysia, anyone they offered the seat to would probably say “thanks, but no thanks”.

@adam-tate – There’s maybe only one driver who could reasonably step in to replace Massa at the moment: Sergio Perez. For all their mistakes in being late to the drveir development party, Ferrari made a smart move in picking up Perez when they did. The Sauber C31 is a lot like the F2012 in that it appears to be very sensitive to changes, though it is a lot more forgiving than the F2012. Perez has the bizarre ability to produce the same lap times on hard tyres as the leaders do on softs, but he can do it without murdering the tyres. Just once, I’d like to see Sauber put him on a two-stop strategy and tell him to go bananas.

The problem Perez faces is that Ferrari is a team that is defiantely built around Alonso, and he’s staying there until 2017. If Massa were to leave the team at the end of the season and Perez replaced him, he would have to go four years before he could take on the role of lead driver. And that’s a shame, because given a front-running car, I think Perez could one day be World Champion. The problem is that he can’t really move to Red Bull, because they favour Vettel, and McLaren isn’t really an option because Perez is sponsored by Claro/Telmex, who are (probably) competing with Vodafone through Verizon (though Carlos Slim has a limited partnership with Verizon).

I know it seems like I’m drifting away from the topic here, but there is a point in all of this: Ferrari needs an attitude change. They’re holding onto Massa when he probably should have been released last year. They have a development program with talented drivers, but they’re not using it; instead, they’re adopting a wait-and-see approach. They can hardly expect Perez to wait around forever, especially if the Slims buy Sauber, and get Perez into McLaren in exchange for a Marussia-like technical tie-in. Meanwhile, they’re giving up all of their talented people – Dyer, Costa, et al – as soon as things start going wrong, whilst the whole thing is being run by someone who is using the team for his own political ambitions: Luca di Montezemolo. Just look at his comments about how Ferrari would support customer cars if they could dictate who drove them, in which case they would pick an Italian. There are no Italian drivers who are good enough for Formula 1 at the moment, but Luca wants Ferrari to be seen as getting an Italian back into Formula 1 (just so long as they’re not the ones who have to put up with a poor driver), so that he can advance his own political career. I’m surprised Enzo Ferrari hasn’t come back to life to smite him for it. He’d never tolerate someone using the team for their own ends.

In short, what Ferrari need is an attitude change. The approach to Formula 1 has changed, but they’ve been slow to pick it up. They need to start going through the junior ranks and finding the really talented guys – Korjus, Sirotkin, Calado. But they won’t. They’re too conservative for that, more willing to settle for third in the WCC when they could take a gamble on a young driver and come second if they’re right of fourth if they’re wrong. Ferrari just aren’t Ferrari anymore.