► Sergio Marchionne demands 2016 Ferrari F1 success
► ‘Hopefully we can be a match for Mercedes’
► Why F1 will feel a lot different in 2016
A friendly warning from the president of Ferrari is a bit like a friendly warning from Don Corleone. Best to heed it, especially as this isn’t Sergio Marchionne’s first expression of dissatisfaction at his team’s performance. Patience may be wearing a bit thin.
In his first address to the Scuderia in November 2014, he described Ferrari’s first win-less season since 1993 as damaging to the Ferrari brand. ‘If we don’t improve quickly,’ he said, ‘we will have to consider our long-term future in F1 because this level of performance is affecting our credibility in the road car market.’
One year on and Marchionne states his view even more strongly. ‘If I can give some advice to all those who work at Maranello,’ he said before Christmas, ‘it’s to be terrified by the arrival of Spring. The only way we will get respect from our rivals is if we see something in Melbourne.’ A sobering thought, with that season-opener in Australia on 20 March barely two months away.
To add to the pressure, it’s not just Ferrari itself that needs Ferrari to succeed in 2016 – the whole sport badly needs it too. F1’s global television audience is shrinking and a bona fide on-track battle is the only way it will reverse the trend.
The problem is Mercedes. Their recent domination has become monotonous, dyspeptic even, because Lewis Hamilton has flattened all challengers. The mass audience doesn’t like a serial winner: only in the USA were TV ratings up in 2015; everywhere else the sport was in decline – even in the UK, Lewis’s homeland. British fans further demonstrated their disapproval at the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year, where Lewis lumbered in fifth – behind the controversial boxer Tyson Fury. It was virtually his worst result of the entire season.
Not for the first time then, Ferrari holds the key to F1’s revival. The team won three races last year and their rate of development remained linear throughout the season. By season’s end there wasn’t much to separate Ferrari and Mercedes, but the Scuderia lacked the necessary consistency to mount a title challenge. At some tracks the SF15T was mighty, at others it looked relatively ordinary. Take the back-to-back races in Singapore and Japan: Sebastian Vettel dominated at Marina Bay, but he finished a distant third at Suzuka less than a week later. Different circuits and different tyre compounds, but the team knows it needs to reduce those peaks and troughs.
‘If we do everything that we intend to do over the winter,’ says Ferrari tech boss James Allison, ‘then we have a realistic chance that next year will be a classic, both for the sport and for Ferrari.’ These are encouraging words for two reasons. First, Ferrari are aiming high with their new car; they want to win and are not talking about a ‘transitional year’, which has been their get-out clause for the past few years. Second, the team has always set achievable goals under Allison’s leadership. The progress made with the SF15T last year was exactly what he expected prior to the first race and there’s no reason why the team shouldn’t achieve its design targets this time around.
The bedrock of the team’s 2015 resurgence was its power unit. Using GPS and acoustic data, rival teams calculated that there was little to separate Ferrari and Mercedes, with both power units producing significantly more than 900bhp in qualifying trim. That placed them at least 60bhp ahead of Renault and Honda.
At the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez in Mexico, where altitude and a 1.2km pit straight placed great emphasis hybrid efficiency and raw power from the internal combustion engine, Vettel was just 0.3sec slower than pole-sitter Nico Rosberg. It was a similar story at Monza, another power track, where Kimi Räikkönen qualified only 0.2sec shy of pole.
‘The guys working on the power unit did a phenomenal job last winter,’ says Allison. ‘They ran out of time, not ideas, and I hope they can make more progress ahead of next season. But there have been similar levels of progress across the car, in the wind tunnel for example, which is why we’re excited about next season.’
As the Ferrari aerodynamicists pile on more downforce, they will need to be careful not to eliminate one of the SF15T’s strongest points: tyre life. The car was significantly stronger in this area than the Mercedes W06, which was why it performed so competitively in extreme heat (Malaysia, win number one) and on Pirelli’s softer tyre compounds at Monaco and Singapore. But Allison and his engineers are mindful of this and any extra downforce will no doubt be spread evenly across the car.
Such bullish talk from the tech chief will be welcomed by Marchionne, who clearly believes in the stick rather than the carrot. But he hasn’t limited his threats to within Maranello; he’s also flexed Ferrari’s political muscle with the FIA. At the end of last year he exercised the team’s power of veto to halt the introduction of a cheap 2.2-litre V6 twin-turbo engine in 2017, and he’s now dishing out threats to quit the sport, should any political influence be wrestled away from the Scuderia in the future. ‘Ferrari could find other ways to promote itself and to race,’ says Marchionne. ‘F1 would change without Ferrari; it would be something else. Nobody would be interested in F1 without Ferrari, not even Mercedes.’
Whether F1 without Ferrari would be the disaster that Marchionne predicts is debatable, and you have to wonder what else the Prancing Horse would place in its new €40m F1 headquarters, which it opened last summer. That’s to say nothing of the Concorde Agreement, which binds all of the current teams to F1 until 2020. But what’s indisputable is that Ferrari is a more vociferous member of the F1 Establishment under Marchionne than it was in the latter years of Luca di Montezemolo’s reign.
A season-long battle between Ferrari and Mercedes would also allow Hamilton and Vettel to shape their legacies. Between them they’ve won seven of the last eight drivers’ titles and a total of 85 grands prix, but both men still have their doubters. They’ve had the benefit of driving the best car in their title-winning seasons and a no-holds-barred fight between them would shed light on their levels of greatness.
Hamilton’s speed has never been in doubt, but his record under pressure remains a bit nebulous. Better the hunter than the hunted, as proven by his inability to nurse his injured car to the finish in Canada 2014 while team-mate Nico Rosberg finished second with the same technical issue. There have been moments of madness too, such as his (yes, his) decision to pit under the Safety Car at Monaco last year, which lost him the lead of the race and cost him victory.
‘Lewis’s speed isn’t in doubt,’ says former F1 driver Juan Pablo Montoya. ‘But he does make mistakes, particularly when he has someone breathing down his neck, or when he feels hard done by. Don’t get me wrong: he’s a great driver, but he still needs to convince me in that area.’
Vettel’s critics point to him driving easily the best car during his four title-winning seasons and his reputation was tarnished in 2014 when he was outperformed by team-mate Daniel Ricciardo. Seb arrived at Ferrari needing to reassert himself, and he’s done all he can against Räikkönen.
‘We didn’t have as good a car as Mercedes last year,’ says James Allison in Seb’s defence. ‘Yet Sebastian won three races with it. We asked him to work miracles to put our car in a competitive position because it wasn’t good enough to be a winning car. He delivered those miracles lap after lap, race after race.
‘You want lots of things from a driver: you want him to be fast and not to make mistakes, and quite often the type of character who ticks both of those boxes isn’t the most sympathetic person to get along with. But Sebastian is very straightforward and he keeps his ego in check because he wants to be a part of the group.
‘I’ve worked with two drivers who really, really understand the value of being in a team: Michael [Schumacher] and Sebastian. That’s not to denigrate the others, but it’s a particular strength of Sebastian’s and it was a particular strength of Michael’s.’
Hamilton and Vettel have had remarkably few on-track battles during the 154 GPs that they’ve contested together. They didn’t fight wheel-to-wheel at all last year, despite Vettel getting onto the podium 13 times, and you have to go back to Formula 3, to the Lausitzring in 2005, to find their last true wheel-to-wheel dice. Hamilton came out on top, but Vettel kept him at bay for several laps on a damp track.
‘Lewis is a great driver,’ says Vettel. ‘He deserves the success he’s had these past couple of years, but I think I can challenge for the title next year and that means taking on Lewis. I think we’d have a good battle. You have to believe in yourself as a driver and, as a team, we’ve learnt a lot that should help us next season. Hopefully we can be a match for Mercedes, or be more competitive than them; that’s the aim.’
Hamilton is equally excited about the prospect of taking on Vettel. ‘I saw a photo the other day of Nigel [Mansell] and Ayrton [Senna],’ he says. ‘They were wheel-to-wheel down the main straight at Barcelona; they had sparks coming out and it was really spectacular. I can’t wait for that to be me and Sebastian. Imagine if we had a race like Bahrain 2014, where Nico and I were back and forth, back and forth. That would be the most exciting thing ever!’
Clearly, the drivers are up for the fight in 2016, as are Ferrari. Even the Mercedes management wants more of an inter-team battle this year. ‘We take the Ferrari competition, the Ferrari threat, very seriously,’ says Merc team principal Toto Wolff. ‘But competition is good; I think it is important for F1 that there is more going on in the front.’
A recipe for fireworks? For the sake of the sport, the fans, the drivers and of course Ferrari, let’s hope so.
Seven reasons why F1 will feel different in 2016
> New look
Channel 4 is F1’s new terrestrial broadcaster in the UK for the next three years, reportedly forking out £60m following the BBC’s decision to walk away from its contract with Bernie’s FOM three years early. C4 pipped fellow commercial channel ITV to the contract, almost certainly on the promise that the races will be advert-free. Crucially, while global F1 audiences plummet, the sport remains prominently available on free-to-air.
> New team
There will be a new team on the grid and, unlike other newcomers in recent years, Haas F1 could challenge for points from the outset. Its technical tie-up with Ferrari will provide many short-cuts and, in Romain Grosjean, it has a very good driver.
> Longest ever calendar
There will be 21 races, which is two more than in 2015. Germany comes back after a year off and F1 has a new street race in Baku, Azerbaijan. The race runs back-to-back with Montreal, which could prove a logistical nightmare.
> Greater tyre choice
Three, rather than two, tyre compounds will be made available by Pirelli at each race. They will also provide the teams with a fifth dry-weather compound: the ultra-soft tyre. It will be super-grippy, but fast-wearing.
> McLaren won’t be rubbish
Honda’s power unit will have significantly different architecture this season. It can’t be any less competitive than the recalcitrant lump that humbled Alonso last year…
> Renault’s back!
Renault will have its own F1 team for the first time since 2009. It bought Lotus just before Christmas and one of its drivers will be newbie, and former GP2 champ, Jolyon Palmer.
> Max, now with added expectation
King of the overtakes Max Verstappen will still be a teenager, but he’ll no longer be the new boy. Can he maintain the momentum built up during year one?