Formula One no longer truly fears bizarro Ferrari

Ferrari is supposed to be challenging Mercedes for the championship this year, and if you ask anyone at Maranello, that is exactly what the team is doing.

The reality of the situation – the statistics, the form, the points – tell a different story.

The season started off strongly for Ferrari, with Sebastian Vettel briefly the race winner-elect at the Australian Grand Prix before a strategic bungle blew it for the German.

The gap has waxed and waned over subsequent races, delivering further opportunities for merit-based victories, including in Canada and (technically) Spain, but on all occasions Ferrari let itself down. Though the points gap would still be large, victories would at least lend the outfit credibility, especially if it could pull together for a strong second half of the season.

Instead the Prancing Horse, after bolting from the gate, remains at something more like a trot. Why? Ferrari lack direction, and with chronic mechanical troubles, any momentum that might otherwise be available to it is gone.

Compounding matters is that Ferrari seems in denial about the true picture of things – about how effective Mercedes’s steady stream of upgrades have been compared to its own and about how far forward Red Bull Racing’s watch-branded Renault power unit has come since 2015 – and is refusing to set its sights on more reasonable 2016 targets.

“The fact that Red Bull is performing very well is good for Formula One – good for the competition, for the show,” Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivabene was game enough to admit, before adding, “I still think that our target is Mercedes, not Red Bull.”

Naturally this is what the team principal of Formula One team backed by the world’s most famous car manufacturer is going to say. He would hardly have rallied the troops if he told the press that his team had lost its way in 2016 and must now focus on securing third in the championship standings. However it demonstrates a certain unwavering belief shared among those at Maranello and more broadly that Ferrari’s natural state is victory.

A look at the long-term history of the matter suggests this is far from the case.

Certainly on raw numbers Ferrari is the most successful team in Formula One overall, but even this statement comes with caveats. It is the oldest team in Formula One by a significant margin and the number of its early successful competitors to have disappeared rather than continue to fight is similarly large.

On a percentage basis Ferrari is only 1.39 per cent more successful on a victories-per-race basis than McLaren, its oldest rival, and it holds a smaller margin over Red Bull Racing and its not insignificant 217 race starts.

Secondly, though Ferrari obviously has the most constructors championships, the way in which they have been delivered is key to understanding the Scuderia’s form.

Four of Ferrari’s 16 championships were won between 1975 and 1979, six were won between 1999 and 2005, and the balance sit around these two boon periods – but just as feasts dot Ferrari’s 66-year history, so too do famines.

Ferrari was title-less for 14 years between 1984 and 1998, and it was a dry decade as far as championships were concerned before the team won its 1975 crown.

Its record for delivering drivers championships is even more galling, with all of 20 years slipping by before Michael Schumacher delivered his first in red at the end of the 2000 season.

These barren periods for Formula One’s most famous team are littered with infighting and dysfunction. Cars with the handling capabilities of trucks, to borrow a phrase from one iconic world champion, and a pair of races in 1973 for which the team didn’t show up at all.

Modern Ferrari is burdened with the weight of the Schumacher-Brawn-Byrne-Todt legacy that delivered so much so quickly, but in reality it should be coloured only with a history of being a bit average, of at times being bit disappointing, and of sometimes being even a bit of a basket case.

“I think at this stage of the season to say that we’re going to give up is not absolutely correct,” Arrivabene said after the British Grand Prix in which his car finished an underwhelming and outclassed fifth and ninth. “In terms of problems, bad luck, and everything we are already the top in terms of points. I hope that these kinds of points can go down and we start to get better. To say we give up – not at all.”

And give up he certainly shouldn’t – but to expect the world of Ferrari is folly. Expect the team to poke its head up every now and then and sniff around for a win, and maybe even every so many seasons have its house in order sufficient to take a title, but the long-awaited second coming of the early 2000s Scuderia is far from guaranteed, and even unlikely.

The Ferrari we have now – the passion and the zest for racing as well as the bizarre miscalculations and mistakes – is the truest Ferrari. Don’t get your hopes up.

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