Scuderia Ferrari - Mythical Or Myth?
Something that periodically comes up is Ferrari's competence.
It's a hot topic again right now so to adopt the phrasing of
FalseSwipeGaming:
How GOOD were Ferrari ACTUALLY?
Beginnings In Formula One
It is important to note that although Formula One has long been, and arguably still is, a sport with dominant headquartering in England, at the time of its inception Formula One was very much an Italian-dominated affair. French teams had their run of sports cars in the 1920s, German cars dominated the original European Grand Prix Championship scene of the 1930s and by the time of the inaugural World Championship For Drivers, the best team, car and drivers were in Italy. And that team was Alfa Romeo, largely because their car was the most well-engineered and had been racing the longest.
Alfa Romeo won 6 of the 7 races in 1950, only missing out on the egregious Indy 500. Their drivers Farina, the champion, and Fangio, the runner-up, were the only drivers to win Formula One races. Going into 1951, Ferrari joined Alfa Romeo as a top team in a sport increasingly dominated by Italy. Although Alfa Romeo won the title again through Fangio, Ferrari did win three races towards the end of the season. Their first, at the British Grand Prix, was won by Jose Frolian Gonzalez with Alberto Ascari winning the next two races after that in Germany and Italy to give Ferrari a strong chance of top success in 1952.
And here is where we come to our first hurdle.
In 1952 there was no Alfa Romeo. They did not have the finance to replace their 158/159 and thusly withdrew from motor racing. BRM was having difficulties with its monstrous supercharged V16 engine and after negotiations to sign Fangio failed and they also withdrew before the 1952 season started. Although there were still a few token Talbot and Maserati entries in private hands, Ferrari were the only "works" team and the only team committed to every European event on the calendar. This made Ferrari the best team by the two greatest words in the English language:
default. Faced with the possibility of only one serious team, the FIA took the extraordinary decision to run the 1952 and 1953 World Championships to Formula Two regulations to encourage more entrants at a reduced cost. During this Formula Two era Ferrari won 14 of the 17 races and Ascari dominated to win back-to-back titles.
There is no taking away that Ferrari had the best car, even in F2 trim, and completely blew away the Connaughts, Simcas and HWMs but it is important to note that the first time Ferrari were the dominant team, they had little to no competition.
Alberto Ascari, the first Ferrari World Champion
As the rest of the decade passed, those Connaughts, Simcas and HWMs showed that the sport was drifting away from the Italian inertia inherited from the purgatory 1940s Grand Prix scene and that English teams such as Cooper and Vanwall were beginning to improve. And in 1954-55, Ferrari stood no chance against Mercedes-Benz; numerous 2nd places were scored but Fangio won back-to-back titles with the Silver Arrows. That Fangio moved to Ferrari and won the title in 1956 is no doubt down to the decision of Mercedes-Benz withdrawing from motor sport in light of the Le Mans disaster.
Another title followed in 1958 with Mike Hawthorn but only one Grand Prix victory showed that although Ferrari had won four of the nine World Championships thus far, other teams were catching up. In 1959 the first of many public disagreements with a driver occurred; Ferrari had only recently signed Jean Behra to drive for them in Formula One when Behra, running his own Porsche venture in Formula Two, beat the works Ferraris at the French Grand Prix support event. This enraged Enzo Ferrari and Behra was sacked for punching team manager Romolo Tavoni in a restaurant in a disagreement over Behra's extracurricular activities.
Ferraris flanked by Coopers; the onset of the rear-engined revolution.
The Great Walkout
In 1961 Ferrari again won the title with Phil Hill but the year was marred by the tragic death of Ferrari's Wolfgang von Trips at the Italian Grand Prix. von Trips was leading the title at the time of his death and Hill's victory at that Italian Grand Prix secured the title for Ferrari but their lead driver was dead. By this time the emergance of English Formula One teams that had started with Cooper's rear-engined revolution was almost complete. The grid was awash with Lotuses, Coopers and BRMs and many inside the Ferrari team had become dissatisfied with Enzo Ferrari's uncompromising management style, feeling that it had contributed to such a weak title defence in 1962 as well as the interference of Enzo's wife in company and team affairs.
This came to a head when team manager Romolo Tavoni, chief eingineer Carlo Chiti, sports car chief Giotto Bizzarrini and sales manager Girolamo Gardini issued
Il Commendante an ultimatum - either his wife is removed from company affairs or they leave. There are no prizes for guessing what course of action was taken by Mr Ferrari and the "great walkout" of such critical and successful employees led many to believe that it was the end of Ferrari; the company was in a dire financial state and with so many key players suddenly dismissed, the future of the company was in serious doubt.
Enzo Ferrari and his wife, Laura. The combination nearly led to the premature demise of the Scuderia.
Ferrari's Young Saviour
The health of the company was so severe after the great walkout that Ford were extremely close to purchasing Ferrari in 1963 until Enzo Ferrari cancelled the deal at the last minute. After two years of great difficulty both on and off the track, Ferrari began turning a corner. One of the biggest gambles that Enzo Ferrari ever made was dismissing the team that had given him five titles in twelve years and entrusting the future of the company in young and unknown engineers. Two of those engineers were Mauro Forghieri and Gian Paolo Dallara.
Ferrari initally only decided to sell sports cars to the public to raise funds for its racing activities. As mentioned, by 1962/63 the company was on its knees financially and the key staff had all left. Gian Paolo Dallara was not at Ferrari for very long but it cannot be overstated that the work done by Forghieri saved Ferrari; Forghieri designed two cars which saved Ferrari and their reputation - the 250 and the P series. To move sideways to Ferrari's sportscar activities for a moment, the success of the 250 and P330 and their derivatives, combined with sales of the 250 road car, revitalised Ferrari's fortunes. Forghieri turned it around on the track in the face of the legendary Jim Clark and his Lotus and the company began making healthy financial profits which convinced
Il Commendante that the sale to Ford was not needed.
Mauro Forghieri would work with Ferrari as its chief desinger, engineer and technical director in some capacity all the way through until 1984. From the time of Phil Hill to the time of Gilles Villeneuve, if there is a Ferrari that you like, he had a hand in it.
Mauro Forghieri, the man who saved Ferrari from the ashes of The Great Walkout.
Another Driver Problem
Forghieri's novel Ferrari 158 was a fast, quick and effective machine that gave John Surtees the 1964 championship and the distinction of being the only world champion on two wheels as well as four. What happened next? Surtess left Ferrari in early 1966 after winning the Belgian Grand Prix. Surtees was overlooked for one of Ferrari's Le Mans entries due to Ludovico Scarfiotti being a relative of Gianni Agnelli and feeling hurt by the lack of support from both the team and Enzo Ferrari personally, Surtees walked out on the team, arguably costing himself and them the 1966 title. Over the next two years Surtees had contextually great success with Cooper and the fledgling Honda team and it appears that Ferrari's misuse of an obvious talent stretches back a long way.
John Surtees in his final race for Ferrari, winning the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix.
The First Dry Spell
Ferrari did not win the driver's title after Surtees' win in 1964 for eleven years. In that time they failed to win any Grands Prix in 1965, 1967, 1969 and 1973. The era of Formula DFV had arrived and once again Ferrari fell behind. During a time when Ferrari was very often the
only team not using a Ford-Cosworth V8, their big, heavy V12s simply couldn't keep up. There is a famous quote Enzo Ferrari once said about engines and aerodynamics:
There is a very, very true nuance here in that what he said was absolutely true during the time of dangerous, experimental wings but by 1970 it was clear that cars with wings and smaller engines were lighter, handled better and were far more economical. But any fans of classic F1 can tell you that for a team that builds "good engines", Jacky Ickx and especially Chris Amon deserved a lot better from their Ferrari machinery.
Chris Amon was one of several drivers never given the machinery Ferrari promised.
A Brief Ascendance
Ferrari's dry spell was ended with the signing of Niki Lauda. Lauda was unlucky not to win the 1974 championship; he led the standings after the British Grand Prix but failed to finish any of the next and final five races, three of which were from pole position. But by 1975 and after eleven years of tinkering Forghieri went back to the drawing board and replaced the aging 312/312B with the all-new 312T - a clean, simple car that responded well to changes in settings and upgrades. Lauda was by far the class of the field and won both the 1975 and 1977 titles at a canter and would have had a fair chance of completing the hat-trick if not for his 1976 crash.
A tempremental T4 won the title in 1979 at the hands of Jody Scheckter but he and teammate Villeneuve were about to be brought back down to earth.
Lauda brought some much needed success back to Ferrari after 11 years.
The Twenty-One Year Itch Begins
Formula DFV was still just about the norm for most of the field and the lightweight, evenly positioned V8 was perfect for the ground effect revolution. Ferrari still persisted with a 12 cylinder engine and had been using a flat-12 boxer engine throughout the 1970s but Scheckter and Villeneuve had a torrid time in 1980 as their aging 312T with a heavy boxer engine unsuited for ground effect was left floundering at the back of the grid. Schecker only scored points once from nine finishes and even failed to qualify for the Canadian Grand Prix. Villeneuve hardly shone in an off year for him. The car was hopelessly obsolete and so were Ferrari and that's before the turbo revolution killed off even the DFV engines.
The replacement 126CK had a fantastically fast turbocharged V6 engine thanks to the work of Nicola Materazzi, who had experience with turbos after working on the Lancia Stratos rally car, but the car suffered from a poor power curve and was terrible aerodynamically. It was little more than a T5 with an engine suited for ground effect. English designer Harvey Postlethwaite was drafted in to fix the car in time for 1982 and he commented that the car's design was so bad that it produced only 25% of the downforce compared to the Lotus and the Williams. Postlethwaite, an English designer with an insight from the English teams that had dominated the sport for the past two decades, redesigned the 126CK into the 126C2 using not only design cues from English cars but also manufacturing cues; it was the first genuine monocoque Ferrari bringing it on par with its English equivalents for the first time since the sharknose.
The 312T5's looks alone tell you that this was the start of Ferrari's two decade decline.
The Year That Should Have Been
In 1982 the class of the field were Didier Pironi and Gilles Villeneuve in Harvey Postlethwaite's miraculous 126C2. What happened in 1982 cannot be reversed but without the death of Villeneuve and the career-ending injury to Pironi it is reasonable to suggest that one of those drivers almost certainly would have won the championship that year. After the French Grand Prix Didier Pironi led the championship. He never raced in F1 again after his crash in practice for the German Grand Prix. Amazingly, there were still five races to go and Pironi still finished 2nd in the championship by just 5pts.
1982 was a black year for Ferrari and things were not going to get any better.
"I will never speak to Pironi again." He never did.
Consistently Inconsistent
After the controversy with Pironi and Villeneuve Ferrari treated new signings Rene Arnoux and Patrick Tambay as equal as was reasonably possible. They did not want a repeat of what happened last year when the drivers were not on speaking terms at the time of Villeneuve's death. Not favouring Arnoux and Tambay saw Ferrari falter in the title challenges of 1983 and 1984 but their consistent, not maximum, points scoring did enable Ferrari to retain the constructor's championship in 1983.
The next driver to fall out with Ferrari was Arnoux. Arnoux was unimpressed with the culture at Ferrari and his lack of motivation saw him leave the team "by mutual consent" after just one race in 1985. That same year, Michele Alboreto emulated Pironi somewhat; he was a solid contender for Prost's title but failed to score any points in the final five races. Alboreto would decline as a driver for the Scuderia until 1988, nadiring in 1987 where he only managed four points finishes and suffered an ignominious eight consecutive DNFs. Outshone by his rising teammate Gerhard Berger, Berger gifted Ferrari their only wins during the height of the Prost-Piquet-Mansell-Senna era as Ferrari's heavy and thirsty cars were left behind by two more English teams, Williams and McLaren.
Alboreto up in smoke - a typical sight during the mid-1980s.
The arrival of John Barnard in 1988 is a very telling insight into how the Ferrari team worked. Barnard, having had success at all-conquering McLaren, was able to dictate his terms when Ferrari made their approach. Barnard became Ferrari's technical supremo and used the large sum of money Ferrari put at his disposal to create his design offices in
England. He believed he would work better not because he was English and wanted to stay in England but that working away from the Italian press would enable him and his team to work more effectively and with less stress. With that said, Barnard upset his engineering team when he banned them from drinking wine on their breaks during testing days which apparently was seen as normal in Italy.
Barnard's revolutionary semi-automatic gearbox was a first and a first made by Ferrari but as with a lot of technical innovations such as Tyrrell's raised nose, the first to do it and the first to make use of it are not always the same. Ferrari's initial semi-automatic gearbox was horrendously unreliable and spoiled Nigel Mansell's time at the team. By the time the gearbox was reliable, other teams had copped on and created their own.
Prost came close in 1990 if not for Senna deliberately crashing into him.
The Barren Spell
Alain Prost won the 1990 French Grand Prix. Ferrari wouldn't win another race for 4 years and wouldn't win more than one race in a season for 6 years. Prost left the team towards the end of 1991 when the horrendously engineered 643 left him aghast, commenting that "a truck would be easier to handle". The mercurial Jean Alesi was a popular figure at Ferrari during this time but Alesi was born under a ladder and either was given a horrendous car such as 1992's F92A or suffered the most awful luck, usually some sort of V12 expiring in a cloud of smoke. Ferrari were the last team to finally give up on the bigger, heavier and thirstier engine configuration. This insistance on a losing configuration must go some way to explaining Ferrari's lack of success or consistent running at this time; the Renault V10 had shown the way forward, a perfect compromise between the light weight of a Ford V8 and the power of a Honda V12.
Other fruitless endeavours include the 1992 F92A's "double bottom" which was far more trouble than it was worth and Ivan Capelli's reputation never quite recovered from his brief spell driving for Ferrari. 1993 was the final year for active suspension, something Ferrari never got quite right and the F93A was hopelessly uncompetitive again. 1994 did see some improvement thanks to Gustav Brunner's work on the 412T1, so much so that these later cars were christened the 412T1B and Ferrari finally won again in Germany, four seasons after their previous victory.
A fair reflection on Alesi's time at Ferrari.
The Schumacher Years
Jean Todt had become Ferrari team manager in late 1993, joining from Peugeot's successful sportscar programme. Not being a graduate of the Ferrari way of doing things, Todt used the Peugeot Talbot Sport way of doing things, "I'm going to sign the best people to do the best job". After Schumacher and Benetton crushed the opposition in 1995, the move was made. Ferrari poached the best driver in the world and the best driver in the world hand-picked the staff to come over with him, most notably designer Rory Byrne and technical director Ross Brawn. Due to contractual obligations not all of Schumacher's transplanted staff came over immediately in 1996. 1996 was a difficult first year in a terrible Ferrari for Schumacher; the car was an ugly, unreliable mess and Irvine was not the point-scoring number two he was supposed to be.
But when everything came together in 1997 and the car was consistently competitive, the success was there to be reaped and it was for five consecutive years from 2000 until 2004. There's little more to say about this era. You know how good it was for Ferrari.
Times were so good people just assume this is, was and has been the norm.
Post-Schumacher Fluke?
Kimi Räikkönen is still the last driver to win the championship for Ferrari. At the time of this post, that was 15 years ago, fast approaching the 21 year gap between Scheckter and Schumacher. Much like Ascari winning back-to-back titles in the 1950s, you absolutely cannot take away what Räikkönen did and he won the title fair and square with more points than any one else. However it would be churlish to exclude the opinion that 2007 was not a year that Ferrari won but a year that McLaren lost. Alonso and Hamilton's intra-team rivalry, very reminiscent of Pironi and Villeneuve in some ways, saw them take points off each other and lose focus. McLaren snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Fifteen years and counting.
Alonso's Folly
During an era of constant rule changes (2006, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2017, 2022) it has been difficult for most teams to remain as competitive as they have been compared to the previous set of regulations. Ferrari threw away the 2010 title with a horrendous strategy call at Abu Dhabi (the race where Alonso couldn't pass Petrov) which now appears to be their speciality even 12 years later but the monstrosity of a car they called the F2012 was so bad it was a miracle that Alonso went into the final race with a chance of winning at all. Red Bull had by far the best car during the four year 2010-13 period and the performances Alonso was able to put in masks a lot of obvious deficiencies as seen by Räikkönnen and Massa in the years before and after that time.
To take a dog of a machine so close but not close enough.
The Hybrid Era & Now
A winless 2014 and 2016 bookends a winless 2020 and 2021 at a time when most teams might as well not show up unless your name was Hamilton or Rosberg. Throughout most of Ferrari's history their problem has been a reliance on what worked in the past but no longer does, sticking to a tradition which is defeated in the face of technology and alienating top drivers who thrived or had thrived elsewhere; each of these drivers does have their own quirks but Mansell couldn't do it, Prost couldn't do it, Alonso couldn't do it, Vettel couldn't do it.
It is a miracle that they have sleptwalked into having a car that is competitive on paper in 2022 but their mesmerisingly dumbfounding strategy calls appear to be alienating their current top driver who surely would thrive if given a top drive somewhere else.
Business as usual at Ferrari
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This is an opinion piece presented as factually as possible without using first-person writing.
I could have gone into far more esoteric detail but tried to keep it relevant to the facts and events that matter.
