By Graham Duxbury
Formula One from the Inside
Ferrari’s roller
coaster ride
Graham Duxbury is a former
racing driver, champion and TV
commentator. He is featured in
the Hall of Fame at the Daytona
Motor Speedway in the USA.
Here, in 1984, he made history
by winning the famous 24-hour
sports car race in an all-South
African team, partnered by Sarel
van der Merwe and Tony Martin.
When Jody Scheckter crossed the finish line to win the 1979 Italian
Grand Prix and with it the ’79 World Drivers’ championship for
Ferrari, it’s a safe bet that few fans – the tifosi - believed that it
would take 20 long years before they would cheer another Ferrari
world champion.
F
errari’s history is studded with highly
charged emotional peaks and dark
valleys as world championship titles
are fought for and won….or lost. Sadly the
gaps between the ‘highs’ have often been
characterised by long periods of discord
and disagreement within the team leading to
disappointment on the track.
Back in the day, Enzo Ferrari used to take
great delight in creating conflict between
his drivers, believing the increased
psychological pressure would produce
better results. It didn’t work, as many
disgruntled former-Ferrari pilots, including
world champions John Surtees and Niki
Lauda, will confirm, having left the team
under acrimonious circumstances.
When Michael Schumacher joined Ferrari
in 1996 he realised that the age-old team
philosophy of sowing confusion in order to
reap success was fundamentally flawed.
This meant replacing the volatile Italian
management with outsiders. The German
driver famously recruited Frenchman Jean
Todt, a former rally co-driver and Peugeot
team manager, as team principal, adding
UK-born Ross Brawn as manager and South
African Rory Byrne to oversee design and
fabrication.
It took five years and much criticism before
success was achieved with this multinational team. On more than one occasion
the tightly knit squad had to stand together
to weather emotional storms that swirled
about Ferrari’s Maranello base. The result
was five consecutive drivers’ championship
successes for Schumacher from 2000 to
2004. It couldn’t last and when Schumacher
retired for the first time, the team gradually
broke up. There was one last ‘hurrah’ in 2007
when Kimi Raikkonen, who went into the last
race in third position in the championship,
took the title by the slimmest of margins (one
point) from warring McLaren team mates
Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton.
In 2010 Ferrari hired Alonso to replace
Raikkonen who had been roundly criticised
for poor performances and then sacked by
Ferrari president Luca di Montezemelo who,
thanks to a well-structured contract on Kimi’s
part, had to pay the ‘iceman’ around 20
million euros not to race.
Since then Ferrari has slipped further into
chaos, seemingly unable to muster the levelheaded calmness and sense of purpose that
prevailed during the Schumacher-Brawn-Todt
era. Last year Alonso’s joke that he wanted
one of his rival’s cars as a birthday present
did not go down well at Ferrari. Nor did his
refusal to quash rumours that he might leave
Ferrari unless he received a car worthy of his
talent. Of course, Alonso didn’t leave - where
would he go? There were no top teams with
open seats. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his team
mate Filipe Massa was unceremoniously
shown the door after overtures were made to
Raikkonen to re-join the team for 2014.
Di Montezemelo had to eat humble pie and
apologise to Kimi – it was a key condition
linked to his return, which many see as an
insurance policy against Alonso leaving after
four fruitless years chasing Sebastian Vettel’s
Red Bull. Di Montezemolo acknowledges
that having ‘two roosters in the same
henhouse’, as he puts it, is a dangerous
strategy.
Ferreri’s blurred vision of the future has
been compounded by the failure of its 2014
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june 2014
challenger to match up to its competition.
Underpowered and overweight, only Alonso
has been able to wring some performance
out of it.
Perhaps Di Montezemelo has realised,
belatedly, that Ferrari is unlikely to return
with any regularity to the top step of the
podium without radical change - despite the
enviable resources, expertise and financial
backing at its disposal. After making his
displeasure clear at Ferrari’s performance
earlier this year in Bahrain with his wellpublicise d “it pains me” remark, long-serving
team principal Stefano Domencali was left
with little option but to accept blame and
step down.
It must have been devastating for the likable
Italian who was immediately replaced by
the former head of Ferrari’s North American
road-car division, Marco Mattiacci. His first
race in his new role (the Chinese GP) was
actually one of only a handful of F1 races
he has ever attended, having shown no
interest and little enthusiasm for the sport.
And without any experience, it seems
inconceivable that this man will transfigure
into Ferrari’s future saviour.
Perhaps Di Montezemelo should read the
Ferrari history books where he’ll find the
blueprint for success in the pages covering
the 2000 – 2004 seasons.
Sadly, he now labels the key
players of this era ‘mercenaries’
and gives the non-Italians scant
regard for what was achieved against all odds.