While its 1-2 in Australia is unlikely to indicate an immediate title-drought-ending resurgence, the sense that tides are turning at the Italian squad is compelling
JAKE BOXALL-LEGGE
nless Carlos Sainz’s victory at the Australian Grand Prix is the catalyst for a seismic shift in Formula 1’s competitive order, Ferrari will likely match its longest streak without a title at the end of 2024. Sixteen lean years passed between the Prancing Horse’s constructors’ championship trophies in 1983 and 1999, and this remains its biggest drought. But the teams’ title win in 2008 moves ever further away with the passage of time, the fading fingerprints of that year’s success only recently refreshed by Felipe Massa’s legal action against the FIA.
In seasons past, Ferrari’s failure to add to its tally of championships was often traced to the team itself. After the Jean Todt era, the group that had been instrumental in securing successive titles slowly began to disband. Ross Brawn left at the end of 2006, as did engine lead Paolo Martinelli. Chief designer Rory Byrne, the only man who could give Adrian Newey a run for his money in the early 2000s, wound down his involvement with the team on a consultancy basis until 2009. After 2008, the team looked markedly different to that which had conquered all before it only a few years before.
Over the next decade and a half, Ferrari became typecast as a team that couldn’t string a race strategy together and sometimes had the propensity to build poor cars. The F60 of 2009 was an example of the latter point, where the team had sunk so much time and resource into its fierce battle with McLaren over 2008 that it had underestimated the scale of the new aerodynamic rules.
The fumbling of the drivers’ crown in the 2010 Abu Dhabi GP with Fernando Alonso was a strategic miscue, and many of the cars thereafter were only fit to win a couple of races per year. It had only really got close to a title in 2012, 2017, and 2018, but Ferrari was needlessly wasteful with race-winning cars. Titles are won with perfection in modern F1.
But the times, they are a-changin’. Ferrari appears to be genuinely in the ascendancy once again. Ambition now tangibly oozes from its pores, instead of the cold sweat of apathy that had plagued so many of its seasons. There’s a key figure responsible for that shift in mindset, one who hopes to break Ferrari’s title-less streak and restore the Maranello marque to the forefront of F1.
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