Scuderia Ferrari and the next two years in F1. Many Tifosi wonder if we will soon see a winning red car. And sometimes we ask ourselves: how far along is a Formula One championship in Maranello? We don’t want to be pessimistic, but realistic. Let’s try with a “chronological” examination. 2023. Do we expect to see a competitive Ferrari by the end of the year? No.
To win, the historic and glorious team will need much more than several astral alignments, an impressive series of events bordering on the impossible. The ill-fated Mattia Binotto’s SF-23 was born with so many limitations that it should be rebuilt from scratch. But that’s not possible due to time constraints and budget caps.
2024. Do we expect to see a competitive Ferrari? No. It will probably be more competitive than its predecessor, perhaps aiming for some stage victories, but nothing more. The reasoning is that Maranello does not have a technical group capable of meeting the challenges of this F1.
If you have a few years under your belt and some gray hair, you will remember that Ferrari managed to climb back up in the early 90s with a formidable group of people, tirelessly exploiting the open-sky wind tunnel it had, namely its two owned circuits.
Trial and error until they created almost invincible cars. Since 2009, with the ban on private testing (a more foolish choice endorsed by the winning Luca di Montezemolo never existed), Ferrari gradually lost the expertise it had. It is more accurate to say that those skills were not useful in the new regulatory scenario. Failing to keep up with the new working methodologies, they no longer produced excellent products.
Since 2014, they have, at best, hit the mark with two and a half cars. The reflection we often make, which seems difficult to refute, is that the same men (even depleted by some excellent departures) and the same methodologies have never led to different results. Unless we discover that we have a new Adrian Newey in-house and didn’t know it, the “human” material we have does not lead to excellence.
They are excellent professionals, make no mistake, but not to compete on equal terms with Red Bull and probably not even with Mercedes. Areas such as chassis and suspension kinematics have dramatically fallen behind. We can still compete in aerodynamics. The Power Unit is up to par but still the most fragile (yet) in the field.
Do we expect to see a competitive Ferrari in 2025? It’s possible. The mysterious reinforcements that Frederic Vasseur is targeting should join the Maranello team and contribute, especially a prominent mystery figure (even though all prominent mystery figures are under contract).
Unfortunately, we must consider a fundamental factor. In F1, you don’t win if you don’t have a top car. But even if you have one and the team is not at the top, you lose (the history of motorsport is full of such examples).
The problem is that as a corollary to all this, we currently have a deficient pit wall, especially in strategic analysis and the ability to execute rapidly in changing scenarios. Conclusions. Let’s leap forward and project ourselves into 2026. Well, there we are in the mind of God. Also because we don’t even know exactly what the regulations will be, as explained by F1 expert Mariano Froldi for FUnoanalisitecnica.
Ferrari: the current regulatory framework doesn’t help
As you can see, unfortunately, there’s no reason to be cheerful. The president may have time to say that we will win before, but the risk of surpassing the record drought of 21 years without the drivers’ championship (1979-2000) is very real. Concrete and realistic. But aside from all that, there’s another line of thinking, suggested to me by Antonino Rendina: a sport in which it is known that you cannot win for years, with such dominance (the Mercedes case is emblematic, almost 9 years of dominance, now it’s Red Bull’s turn), hasn’t it inherently failed?
Let’s be clear, we’re not discussing the idea of preventing the most skilled from winning (horror!), but perhaps why the foundations for excessively long dominations are unintentionally laid, with the technical and economic impossibility of bridging the gap. The answer is always the same, I believe. It is necessary to completely review the rules and create less restrictive and more flexible regulations.
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