Charles Leclerc’s abandoned Ferrari after he spun of at Turn 1 in Melbourne. Photo / Don Kennedy
Charles Leclerc’s abandoned Ferrari after he spun of at Turn 1 in Melbourne. Photo / Don Kennedy
It has been 16 years since a Ferrari driver won the Drivers’ World Championship, the last being Kimi Raikkonen in 2007.
Ferrari won the Constructors’ title the following year, but Lewis Hamilton, driving for McLaren, beat Ferrari driver Felipe Massa by one point with an overtake of Timo Glock’s Toyota, for fifth place, one corner from the finish lime at the Interlagos circuit in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Massa’s father had already started celebrating his son becoming world champion until a Ferrari crewmember pointed to the TV monitor which showed Hamilton passing Glock, to give him the one point he needed.
A win in his home grand prix was not enough to console Massa, the loss of the championship is almost too much to bear. Some Ferrari fans couldn’t, as Glock received death threats, while some conspiracy theorists were convinced he had been paid off to let Hamilton pass. How that might have been orchestrated is anyone’s guess.
In recent weeks it’s been reported Massa was considering legal advice to challenge Hamilton’s 2008 title. Not due to anything involving Glock, but rather because in the inaugural Singapore Grand Prix that year it transpired Renault team boss Flavio Briatore had ordered Nelson Piquet Junior to deliberately crash his car to bring out the safety-car, and give his teammate Fernando Alonso the opportunity to win the race. Piquet duly obliged with a hard hit into the wall that could easily have injured him. And it worked, as Alonso pitted immediately, got to the front of the race, and won.
So how does that outcome give Massa any grounds to turn the clock back and claim it cost him the championship? Massa pitted under the safety-car, but it was a botched stop, as he collected the air hose on exiting the pits and with a penalty dropped to a 13th-placed finish.
Whilst the points Massa potentially lost that day counted against him when the championship points were added up, it was his team’s mistake that meant he finished 13th. He and his legal adviser are dreaming if somehow they think the FIA will reverse a result cemented 15 years ago.
The protagonist for Massa’s forlorn hope, and by association, Ferrari’s hope of adding 2008 as a drivers’ championship winning season, is former F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone. The latter, who was replaced in 2017, has said recently that he and the late FIA president Max Mosley knew of the situation “during the 2008 season”.
Most people thought it only came out a year or two later that Briatore had manipulated the Piquet crash, but if Ecclestone and Mosley, the two people who ran F1, knew about it, then it reeks of a cover-up, and that may be what Massa is pinning his slim hope on.
“We decided not to do anything for now,” Ecclestone recalled in an interview with F1-Insider. “We wanted to protect the sport and save it from a huge scandal. That is why I used angelic tongues to persuade my former driver Nelson Piquet to keep calm for the time being.
“Back then, there was a rule that a world championship classification after the FIA awards ceremony at the end of the year was untouchable. So, Hamilton was presented with the trophy and everything was fine.
“We had enough information in time to investigate the matter. According to the statutes, we should have cancelled the race in Singapore under these conditions.”
So Massa’s hopes are based on the interview of an eccentric personality like Ecclestone, who sounds like a muckraker, and also brings his own leadership of F1 into disrepute.
If by some miracle, which would make Moses’ parting of the Red Sea look like an amateur act, the FIA overturned the outcome of the 2008 season, it would still not add an ounce of credibility to the performance of the Ferrari team, since 2008.
In 2009, the Brawn F1 team blew away the opposition in a one-off season, but of course, under the directorship of Ross Brawn, that team morphed into the Mercedes team that won eight consecutive Constructors’ titles between 2014 and 2021.
Then in 2010, Alonso joined Ferrari, won the season opener in Bahrain, and the fans thought here we go. He won five races, the same as Sebastian Vettel in Red Bull. But in the championship decider in Abu Dhabi, Ferrari got the race strategy all wrong, pitting Alonso early to cover Vettel’s Red Bull teammate Mark Webber, who was also a title contender, while Vettel from pole position stayed out in the lead. Alonso and Webber got bogged down in traffic on a circuit notorious for a lack of overtaking.
Vettel pitted late and won the race, while Alonso was seventh, and lost the title by four points. A fourth place finish would have given Alonso a third driver’s tittle, and Ferrari its first since 2007.
Charles Leclerc remains optimistic the four-week break will help Ferrari’s comeback. Photo / Don Kennedy
Alonso came close again in 2012 with Ferrari losing yet again to Vettel, by four points. In the season finale in Brazil, Vettel spun at the second corner, and was last. But he managed to keep his car going and eventually finished sixth. while Alonso finished second to race winner Jenson Button in the McLaren. Alonso’s five seasons with Ferrari produced 11 wins and two-second placings.
Vettel replaced Alonso at Ferrari in 2015 and he also finished second in the championship twice, with 14 wins, but like Alonso, was unable to motivate the Scuderia team to topple Mercedes.
Charles Leclerc joined Ferrari in the 2019 season, winning at Spa and Monza in that first season, and fourth place in the championship. There were no victories in 2020 and 2021, but last year he won the season opening race in Bahrain, was second to Max Verstappen in Saudi Arabia, and won again in Race Three in Australia, to handsomely lead the championship. By contrast, Verstappen had one win and two DNFs (Did Not Finish).
But Verstappen recovered from that poor start, and eventually won 15 races and beat Leclerc by 146 points. The latter had one more win during the season, as did his teammate Carlos Sainz, who scored a maiden grand prix win at Silverstone.
Leclerc has five wins and Sainz still has just the one coming into this season, which is Leclerc’s fifth season with Ferrari. As usual, the tifosi, Ferrari’s loyal, but in recent years, long-suffering fans, remain ever hopeful this will be their team’s year. But it seems it is not to be. In the season opener in Bahrain, Leclerc failed to finish, while Sainz was overtaken for third by Alonso, in the Aston Martin. On to Saudi Arabia, and Sainz and Leclerc were only sixth and seventh respectively. That seemed bad enough, but in Australia, things got worse.
Sainz qualified fifth and Leclerc seventh. At Turn 3, Leclerc tried to pass the Aston Martin of Lance Stroll around the outside. The two made brief contact and Leclerc spun off into the kitty litter, race over. Sainz fared better and was running fourth for much of the race. When it was restarted for a third time, he hit the rear of Alonso’s car at Turn 1, spinning his friend and compatriot around. Alonso was able to keep going, but the race was red-flagged for a third time. Returning to the pitlane, Sainz was soon fuming as the race stewards gave him a 5-second time penalty that even Alonso deemed was “too harsh”.
As the race finish behind the safety-car, Sainz was officially 12th, and Ferrari left Melbourne with no points. The stewards said they found Car 55 (Sainz) “wholly to blame for the collision” adding that while it was deemed the equivalent of a first lap incident, “there was a sufficient gap for Car 55 to take steps to avoid the collision and failed to do so”.
In what may seem an act of desperation, Ferrari has appealed that decision. If successful, Sainz will get another 11 points to add to the 20 he currently has, but finishing off the podium is not what Ferrari wants or can accept for a team that was second in the championship last year.
“I think in the situation we are in as a team, we take this opportunity [the four-week break] to work as much as possible during this break, in order to get upgrades as quickly as possible and be as competitive as we want sooner in the season,” Leclerc said on the Formula 1 website.
“It’s still a very, very long season. We are fully motivated to get back on top and we’ll try to use these weeks [ before Azerbaijan] in the best way possible.”
The fighting talk is not just coming from the drivers, but also the chairman of the Ferrari board, John Elkann.
Announcing that the car manufacturer closed the 2022 year with record results, including a turnover of €5.1 billion, Elkann said “deep changes are under way between the walls of Maranello, particularly sporting activity on the track. The desire to progress that our founder, Enzo Ferrari, had in his heart continues to keep Ferrari’s people humble and ambitious in shaping the future of the Prancing Horse.”
The Scuderia Ferrari Twitter account has the following post;
