There were tears in the drivers’ weighing room after last
weekend’s grand prix in Malaysia, and tears in the paddock, too.
Sebastian Vettel wept as he prepared to celebrate his first win for Ferrari,
and the eyes of the team’s technical director, James Allison, moistened as he
spoke of the significance of the day’s events. “Every team works hard,” he told
the Sky Sports F1 team, “but Ferrari works hard with the weight of history on
its shoulders.”
Hence the mass release of emotion not
only at the Sepang circuit but back in Maranello, where the bells of the parish
church are traditionally rung to celebrate victories for the local team. This
was the first call for the bellringers since May 2013, when Fernando Alonso won
his home race at the Circuit de Catalunya. The winless run of 34 races was the Scuderia’s longest in 21 years.
Technical directors don’t usually show
their feelings so openly. Nor, once upon a time, did drivers. It’s hard to
imagine Juan Manuel Fangio crying with joy when he drove to victory in his
first race for Ferrari in
Buenos Aires in 1956. A man of his generation had seen too much of life and
death to feel that tears were an appropriate response to something as
essentially frivolous as success in a motor race.
But last Sunday there was no denying the
importance of a win. First to Vettel, who had switched at the end of last
season from Red Bull, where he captured four titles in a row between 2010 and
2013 but suddenly found himself needing to prove, after one very lacklustre
season, that his talent was both intact and transferrable. And then to the men
who pull the strings at Ferrari and reacted to the prolonged slump with a
Godfather-style bloodletting that resulted in new people being installed in
each of the team’s most senior positions.
Out went Luca di Montezemolo, the charismatic president who represented the last link with
Enzo Ferrari, to whom he had delivered the championship as Niki Lauda’s team
manager in 1975. Montezemolo, the epitome of Italian style, was replaced by
Sergio Marchionne, a Canadian-born, pullover-wearing executive of Fiat,
Ferrari’s parent company.
Domenicali, the genial and courteous team principal, was
brusquely sacked, to be replaced first by Marco Mattiacci, Ferrari’s chief
salesman in the United States, and
then, in a matter of months, by Maurizio Arrivabene, a marketing
specialist. Arrivabene had spent the previous 20 years supervising the flow of
cash from his employer, the Philip Morris tobacco company, to Ferrari, an
arrangement which continued long after cigarette sponsorship was banned and the
Marlboro name, if not the colours of the packet, disappeared from the cars’
bodywork.
Last Sunday even Arrivabene was moved to
tears – not in the public eye as the car crossed the finish line or Vettel
mounted the podium, but in private a little later when he received a text
message of congratulations from Sabine Kehm, Michael Schumacher’s spokeswoman,
who had watched the race from the bedside of the team’s former champion in
Switzerland.
Malaysia was a triumph for a team with a
brand-new superstructure. Allison, who had spent five years at Ferrari during
the Schumacher era, was lured back from Team Lotus and promoted to replace Pat
Fry, another Englishman. Luca
Marmorini gave way to
Mattia Binotto as the head of the power-unit department. And after years of
fumbling on the aerodynamic side, Nicholas Tombazis was replaced as chief
designer by Simone Resta.
A crisis at Ferrari is a drama like no
other, representing the continuation of a tradition going back to the founder,
Enzo Ferrari, with his Machiavellian ploys and the tactical sulks that often
led him to threaten an exit from the sport. This was usually a cover for poor
performance on the track, from which he sometimes needed to be rescued. In
1955, when his cars were being trounced by the Mercedes silver arrows, he was
suddenly given the assets of the bankrupt Lancia team, whose machines, much
faster and more technically advanced than his own, were lightly modified and
rebadged as Ferraris in time for Fangio’s arrival the following season.
There were palace revolutions, too. At
the end of a brilliantly successful 1961 season virtually the entire senior
staff, including the top designers, walked out after Enzo’s volatile wife, who had
taken to intervening in the team’s daily affairs, slapped one of them in the
face during a particularly operatic row. There would be no wins the following
year.
A new low was reached in 1973 when the
most glamorous team in Formula
Onecould muster only a single entry for the British Grand Prix. As
slow as it was ugly, the car limped home in eighth place in the hands of a
thoroughly disillusioned Jacky Ickx, who promptly severed the relationship before
the next round of the championship. That was the point at which Montezemolo – a
protégé of Gianni Agnelli, the Fiat president – was brought in to rescue
Ferrari’s reputation.
Somehow they always manage to turn
things around. Patience can be required, as when Schumacher waited five years
for his first championship with the team. However, the job usually requires the
kind of ruthlessness that was always associated with the founder but which had
clearly deserted Montezemolo in the final years of his presidency.
The dividends of this winter’s changes
have been almost immediate, enabling Vettel, the new recruit in the cockpit, to
celebrate what he called a “fair and square” win over the all-conquering
Mercedes duo of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. Although sceptics claim the
combination of Malaysia’s high temperatures and an effective pit-stop strategy
on the day will not be repeated in China next weekend, the pace of the cars of
Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen looked genuine enough.
If the appointment of Arrivabene
initially seemed an odd one, the new team principal showed class and diplomatic
skill after the race. Instead of marching up to the podium himself to collect
the trophy for the winning constructor, or even sending Allison, he gave the
honour to the team’s chief mechanic, Diego Loverno.
It was, he explained, a way of
acknowledging the amount of hard work put in by everyone, not least those back
at the factory, in order to build a competitive car. “I asked Diego to go up
there,” he said, “because he represents all those not only with beautiful minds
but with dirty hands here and in Maranello.” From a new leader that’s good
psychology: those dirty hands will be working even harder now.
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