The huge task facing Ferrari in 2020

On paper, Ferrari has everything a Formula One team needs to succeed: huge resources, an in-house engine supply and a rich history capable of luring the most talented individuals in the sport onto its payroll. Yet for the past 11 years those ingredients have failed to yield a title success.

You have to rewind the clock to 2008 to uncover the last constructors’ championship victory and 2007 for the last drivers’ title, courtesy of Kimi Raikkonen (who has since come back to the team and left again). A series of false dawns in the 2010s followed those championships, only serving to increase the pressure on the four team principals who have attempted to the right the ship in the past decade.

Yet for all the failings in recent years, the passion at Ferrari’s headquarters in Maranello remains undimmed. There’s still a magic to the place that no rival team can emulate and with it comes the belief that 2020 could be the year the tables turn. But in order to do so, there are some stark realities Ferrari must face up to.

The car

Although the championship tables don’t show it, for two of the last three years Ferrari has had a car with capable of securing a title. In 2017 and 2018, Ferrari’s raw pace was on a par with Mercedes at enough tracks to mount a challenge, but operational mistakes, driver errors and reliability saw its championship campaigns crumble long before the final round. A regulation change then tripped Ferrari up at the start of 2019, but by the second half of the season it returned to winning ways and at certain circuits had the fastest car on the grid once again.

In 2020 there will be no regulation changes, and even the tyres, which Ferrari initially struggled with in 2019, will be the same. In essence, the 2020 season should be a continuation of the second half of 2019, in which Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull were all closely matched.

Two factors were key to Ferrari’s resurgence during 2019 and will remain fundamental for a successful championship challenge in 2020. The first was the horsepower advantage it held over the rest of the field all year, which eventually led to allegations of cheating and subsequent investigations by the FIA into the car’s fuel system. Although suspicions among rival teams remain, the governing body found nothing illegal under Ferrari’s engine cover last year and, in theory, the team should retain some — if not all — of its power advantage in 2020. What’s more, speaking at the end of 2019, Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto promised « significant » changes to the power unit’s architecture and cylinder design for 2020 aimed at raising the bar even further out of reach of Ferrari’s rivals.

But if 2019 taught us anything it was that Ferrari cannot rely on the prowess of its engine department alone. The failings in the first half of the season were traced to a fundamental lack of downforce from Ferrari’s approach to the 2019 regulations, which manifested itself in a car that was rapid on straights but losing up to a second per lap to Mercedes in slow- and medium-speed corners. Despite a strong start to testing, the car proved unstable under braking and was loaded with understeer in slow corners — two factors that Sebastian Vettel particularly struggled with in the first half of the year.

The straight-line speed advantage meant the team’s two victories on the long straights of Spa-Francorchamps and Monza came as no surprise, but the win on the tight and twisty Singapore circuit that followed signaled the biggest breakthrough of all. Based on Ferrari’s performance in the first half of the season, a street circuit littered with 90 degree corners should not have played to the strengths of the car — it struggled at Monaco and again on the tight and twisty Hungaroring — but an aerodynamic upgrade around the front of the car offered the downforce that had been missing. Combined with Mercedes struggling on Singapore’s unusually bumpy track surface, Ferrari took its only one-two victory of the year.

Race wins in Russia and Japan should have followed, but the most important thing long-term was that Ferrari had found a way of extracting more downforce without needing to start from scratch with the 2019 regulation changes. Given there were concerns at the start of the year that the SF90’s approach to the revised regulations was fundamentally flawed, the victory in Singapore was arguably the most important moment of Ferrari’s season.

Speaking at the end of 2019, Binotto hinted that this year’s car will continue with the same aero philosophy, having applied the significant lessons learned in 2019 to start the season on a stronger footing. Building on the Singapore update and the inherent power advantage of the Ferrari engine, the team is aiming to maximise downforce in the knowledge that its extra horsepower will counter the drag that will inevitably come with it.

« Our aim is to have a lot more downforce, and by having more downforce we will certainly have more drag, » Binotto said. « So we are not expecting to be as fast on the straight as we have been. But you never know what the others are doing.

« With the things that we learned, knowing them now we recognize that we need to have certainly more downforce because, as we saw at the end of the season, there is still a gap to close. So, our car is aiming for more downforce and by consequence, we will certainly be working with more on drag. »

There are already reports that Ferrari has taken a wrong turn with its aerodynamic development over the winter, but Januarys rarely pass in Maranello without scare stories filling the gaping void in the F1 news agenda. Assuming the car comes close to its targets, there is no reason to believe Ferrari will struggle to the same extent that it did at the start of 2019.

The team

Compared to its main rivals, Ferrari remains a relatively young team from a personnel perspective. Binotto had only just got his feet under the team principal’s desk when the covers were taken off last year’s SF90, and inevitably it took some time for his change in management style to bed in.

By several accounts, Ferrari’s F1 team operated under a culture of fear prior to Binotto. Former CEO, Sergio Marchionne, held the team to an uncompromising standard during his reign and his expectations were enforced, in no uncertain terms, by former team principal Maurizio Arrivabene. As results continued to fall short of expectations, the pressure from above intensified, but in doing so it only served to speed up the negative spiral in performance.

Binotto, who was often on the receiving end of the orders from above, has attempted to change that culture by empowering those further down the chain of command. Importantly, he has the backing of Ferrari’s new CEO Louis Camilleri, who joined the company from the team’s main sponsor Philip Morris after the death of Marchionne in 2018.

Asked by ESPN if he felt a culture of fear under the previous leadership had held Ferrari back, Camilleri said: « That’s certainly an impression I had as an outsider and as the key sponsor of the team. I don’t want to make a mountain out of it either, but clearly in terms of the culture and terms of the transparency in this day and age, you can always do a lot better.

« That applies to every single company in the world. And I think with the constant information flow, the constant pressure there is, particularly in this Scuderia, there has to be a unity of vision, a unity of spirit and unity of focus. And the only way you achieve that is through culture. »

It may sound like management-speak, but releasing some of the pressure from Ferrari’s workforce will be key to mounting a championship challenge in 2020. Part of Mercedes’ strength over the past six years has been a philosophy of blaming the problem and not the person, and the results speak for themselves. Binotto must implement his own management style and not simply copy Mercedes, but there is hope that changes put in place in 2019 will start to yield results in the coming years.

« We are very much focused, Mattia and I, on the longer term, » Camilleri added. « 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 One, 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. »

The drivers

The most high-profile challenge facing Ferrari this year is the management of its drivers — a problem made all the more visible after they collided at last year’s Brazilian Grand Prix. The incident came at the end of a season in which Ferrari’s driver dynamic was turned on its head, with Vettel starting the year as the No.1 but ending it in the shadow of his new teammate Charles Leclerc.

Leclerc’s new five-year contract — signed in December — only serves to underline where Ferrari sees its future and will leave Vettel asking serious questions about how he fits into the team. Vettel joined Ferrari in 2015 with the aim of being the driver who returned Ferrari to the top. Off the back of four titles with Red Bull, he looked poised to emulate his hero Michael Schumacher and cement his place in F1 history books. For many of the reasons outlined above, it didn’t work out and now he has just one year left on his contract and a teammate who is locked in — and loved — by the team.

From the outside, he has two options in 2020:

1. Become a dutiful Ferrari No.2 in the mold of Kimi Raikkonen, Rubens Barrichello or Felipe Massa.

2. Turn the tables and outperform Leclerc.

Given Vettel’s standing as a four-time world champion and his history of internal battles with teammates, the first option seems unthinkable, making his desire to pursue option two ever greater. But that relies on Vettel significantly upping his game in 2020 and rediscovering some of the form he last displayed seven years ago when he won his final title with Red Bull. Possible, sure, but hardly a safe bet.

If Vettel can’t raise his game, it’s clear that he will soon run out of options and that could create fireworks that make Brazil 2019 look like a mere tealight. Ferrari will like hold one card close to its chest in the form of a contract extension, which has the potential to be used simultaneously as a carrot and stick. Keep a place open for Vettel and Ferrari might just keep him in line through some of the stickier situations that crop up — the only issue being that the problem won’t go away once a deal is done.

Publicly, Binotto has brushed aside such concerns and claims Ferrari benefited from its drivers colliding in Brazil as it cleared the air at the end of a long and stressful season. Going into 2020, he has pledged to treat his two drivers as equal in the hope that the respect he shows to his two talents will be reciprocated by them behaving on track.

« I think that this stuff was important to clarify at the start of last year, but the situation was quite different by the end of the season, » Binotto said when asked by ESPN about having a No.1 driver. « At the start of 2019 we had a young driver for the first time in the Ferrari on one side of the garage and on the other a driver who had many races with Ferrari behind him. So that was the right choice at the time.

« But if you look at a driver’s ambitions at the start of the year, I’m pretty aware that most of them are starting next season with the ambition to do very well as an individual. So, when we get to Australia, they will be free to race and there won’t be a No.1.

« But what’s more important is that this team remains as the first priority and we maximise the team points where we need it. »

The opposition

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Ferrari in 2020 is simply its main rival: Mercedes. While Ferrari has struggled for performance and consistent results for over a decade, Mercedes has been on an upward trajectory and seemingly gets stronger each year.

Ferrari gained ground on Mercedes over 2019, but it did so from a very underwhelming starting point and moving ahead of its main rival on all types of circuit will not be so easy. It will also face a secondary threat from a resurgent Red Bull-Honda, which was outperforming Ferrari at the final few races of 2019.

In Ferrari’s favour, the existence of two genuine rivals could see Mercedes with its hand held to the fire. In recent years when Mercedes has been pushed to the limit it has occasionally led to errors, such as its disastrous German Grand Prix performance in 2019. The onus will be on Ferrari to capitalise on every single one of those in 2020, while tidying up its own act so that it makes the most of the occasions when it has the fastest car.

Doing so could see Maranello turn a page on its title drought of the 2010s and kick start a new era of success in the 2020s.