5 Reasons Why F1 2020 Could Be Ferrari’s Year of Leclerc and Vettel
11Passion. It oozes through the halls of Maranello, home to the world’s most famous racing team – Ferrari. It's what motivates the hundreds of staff to get up each morning, despite having failed to win a Formula 1 constructors' championship since 2008 – a barren run of 11 years. No matter how hard they fall, they always get up again. And on the dawn of another new season, that belief remains: this will be their year. Weakening Mercedes' vice-like grip on the championship will not be easy, but there is a renewed sense of optimism at Ferrari – and there is good reason for it...
1. Internal stability
The Prancing Horse had the best car for much of 2019, particularly in qualifying with Charles Leclerc’s tally of seven pole positions a marker for the season. But their race form wasn’t good enough, with strategy, pit stop errors and driver mistakes undoing their hard work. It also took them too long to unlock the potential of the car – and by the time they did, the race for both championships had been run.
READ MORE: Can Red Bull be genuine title contenders in 2020?
The Ferrari of old would have wielded the axe in disgust over the winter. Second – where they have ended up in four of the last five years - has never been good enough. But this year, they’ve taken a new approach. The axe has been left in the box. Instead chairman Louis Camilleri – who has only been in the job for 18 months – is playing the long game.
“We are very much focused, Mattia (Binotto, Team Principal) and I, on the longer term,” he says. “You don't build the team overnight. We've said quite frequently that this is a young team in the sense that we have a lot of experience and talented people. However, a lot of them are new to their specific jobs and responsibilities.
"So we need patience, we need stability and serenity because if you look back in the history of Formula 1, where teams have done very well, be it McLaren, Ferrari in the good old days, Red Bull or today Mercedes, there is one common thread, which was that there was a lot of stability within the team and therefore they learned to work very closely together. That is something we are very focused on.”
Patience isn’t a trait you often associate with elite sport, not least F1, so it’s refreshing (and brave) that Camilleri is employing such a tactic. Reducing the threat of the axe should, in theory, ease the pressure on the team’s employees and allow them to take risks, push the boundaries and gel as a cohesive unit that can take the knockbacks an F1 season brings and then rebound in a coordinated and efficient fashion. “Yes, we made some mistakes,” adds Camilleri. “But, from my experience, you learn from mistakes.”
2. Financial clout
As in any elite sport, the better funded you are, the more you can invest in resources, infrastructure and talent – and that tends to have a positive impact on your performance. Ferrari have long been the best-resourced team in Formula 1 – and that looks set to continue, particularly considering their hugely successful year on the road car side of the business – which included the launch of the SF90 Stradale hybrid, a machine that has more software than an Airbus A350 airliner.
READ MORE: Ferrari on what went wrong in 2019 – and what they’ve learned for 2020
“We're about to close another record year,” said Camilleri when speaking from an overall company perspective at the Ferrari Christmas lunch in December. “We did pretty well on all the metrics, volume, revenues, income, cash flow. So you'll see a lot of smiling faces around here.
“We're also prepared to invest, and luckily the car business can support those investments, not only in terms of people, but also in terms of infrastructure. One example is, you've probably seen cranes out there which are building a new simulator.”