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Friday, April 3, 2015

Maranello bells quick to ring for new-look Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel


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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