The more Ferrari’s FIA World Endurance Championship team wins and impresses, the more jarring the failure of Racing Division in Formula 1 becomes. And this puts even more pressure on the men led by Frederic Vasseur. To make an easy joke, one might say we need a “Coletta” to lift up a department—and an environment—that has not won in ages. And perhaps that is not so far from the truth, despite the easy pun with Antonello’s last name, which means victory of the people.
Let’s begin with a premise: it is obvious that there are major differences between Endurance and Formula 1. Regulations, car characteristics, presence or absence of Balance of Power, and so on. But it is also true that Ferrari returned to endurance racing after half a century, building on its GT program, and that in its first year with the 499P it won at Le Mans, repeated the feat in the second year, and in the third is leading the standings.
A fantastic and impressive progression. On the other side: disappointment after disappointment. Let’s look at Formula 1. As we sadly know by heart, the last Constructors’ Championship was in 2008, and the last Drivers’ Championship in 2007. After that, a deluge, more or less. Coinciding with the inexplicable complacency with which Luca Cordero di Montezemolo accepted the ban on in-season testing.
Let’s skip the 2009–2013 period, during which Ferrari seriously threatened to win the title twice with Fernando Alonso. Still, even in those cases, the Italian car was not the fastest or most competitive. Continuing: 2014. A disaster, with a project that was dramatically flawed both in terms of chassis and engine. A terrible year.
2015: three wins with Sebastian Vettel. 2016 was marked by an incomprehensible car, which came close to winning on a few occasions, but ultimately ended the season without securing any race wins. 2017: the SF70H was born with the new wide tyres. A short-wheelbase car, very fast in corners but penalized on straights. Still, it competed with Mercedes for most of the championship and won five races. In the 2018 season we had the SF71H, with less drag, faster on the straights, and a top-level engine.
It won six races. But in both these years, the car progressively lost competitiveness toward the end of the season. In the 2019 Formula 1 championship, the missile arrives. A dragster. The SF90 was mostly about the engine, until the infamous secret agreement with the FIA came to light. It won three races, secured many poles, but was never a true title contender. Then we move on to 2020 and the disastrous SF1000 with a significant horsepower deficit compared to rivals. It finished sixth in the Constructors’ Championship.
In 2021, things improved with the SF21. No wins, as in 2020, but many more points, podiums, and a third place in the Constructors’ standings. The 2022 campaign was marked by a projected based on new technical regulations which brought back ground-effect cars, offering an opening. The F1-75 seemed like a complete car, at least until about mid-season. Then it fell off. Four wins and an initial impression that Ferrari could Charles Leclerc a car capable of challenging Max Verstappen for the title. The dream lasted just a few months, during which the Italian side lost a lot of points due to questionable strategic decisions and several power unit reliability issues in the first half of the season when the F1-75 was the fastest car on track, before the Italian side gradually lost the development battle against Red Bull and had no chance of fighting for race wins in the final part of the season.
Moving on to 2023, we recall a flawed car with high tyre degradation. It won just one race, despite securing seven pole positions. Still, Ferrari was the only team to beat the dominant Red Bull even once in the entire year. 2024: a car that seems the opposite of its predecessor. Manages tyres well—perhaps too well, as it struggles to heat them up during qualifying laps. Wins five races.
Then came a sharp drop in performance after the aerodynamic update package introduced by the Maranello engineers and technicians at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, under the guidance of Italian aerodynamicist and former technical director Enrico Cardile, an update which was completely wrong. Ferrari’s Formula 1 technicians took many races to untangle the mess, only becoming competitive again starting with the Italian Grand Prix at the Monza circuit. It finished the 2025 Formula 1 season on an upward trend, which is something extremely rare in recent Ferrari history.
We therefore arrive at the present of the Italian team. 2025: as things stand, Ferrari is plagued by numerous issues, both chassis-related and aerodynamic. The overhaul with the new front suspension has failed, there’s no point in denying it. The SF-25 car is difficult to set up and, it now appears confirmed, the engineers made a major error with the ride heights. To achieve the intended downforce, the car must run with the floor too low to the ground.
Hence the risk of disqualification, as was the case in the Chinese Grand Prix. If you raise the floor, the aerodynamic map falls apart, downforce becomes insufficient, and the car slows down, as we saw two weeks ago at the Miami International Autodrome in Florida. In short, if we analyze the all the projects created by the Ferrari Racing Division from 2014 onwards, there has never been a truly competitive car capable of fighting for the Formula 1 Drivers’ title to the end. Add to that incredible strategic blunders.
Same goes for pit stops, and so on. For example, Monaco 2022 still screams for justice. Another constant throughout these years is the fact that Ferrari cars almost always underperform in the rain. We therefore make a brutal summary: Ferrari hasn’t been able to design a winning car for over 18 years. But here’s something important: many Ferrari engineers who moved elsewhere have had great careers.
So, what’s the problem? Let’s try to understand. On one hand, you could think that Ferrari’s engineers, overall, are not as capable as those at other teams. Or that for reasons unknown to us, when they do get the car right, they lose their way during development. Whether the team principal was Stefano Domenicali, Marco Mattiacci, Maurizio Arrivabene, Mattia Binotto, or Frederic Vasseur, this has unfortunately been a constant.
So? The top F1 teams employ about 1,000 people each. Technologically, Ferrari should not be second to anyone. We refer to engine development, aerodynamics, dynamic benches, Computational Fluid Dynamics, simulation, and so on. So it makes you think: you have the tools, but don’t know how to use them to their fullest. The suspicion arises that it is not so much about lacking talent.
Maybe partly so. Maybe due to the type of specialized education available in the UK but not elsewhere. In the end, Formula 1 is a small, specialized niche, and it is no coincidence that all the so-called “factories”, except Ferrari and Red Bull’s junior team, are based there. Maybe. Or maybe, something is wrong with the operating model, namely how the command chain works.
We are talking about the speed and agility in identifying problems or opportunities and then in finding solutions or performance gains. Perhaps this Ferrari is the child of its own gigantism. As happens with every brand that becomes very rich, strong, powerful, and successful. It gets complacent and introduces countless validation systems, less technical, more bureaucratic. In theory, a system like that ensures long-term results and fewer mistakes.
In practice, it often becomes a deadly burden, especially when too many internal factions start undercutting each other instead of working together toward the optimal result. It is something that, for example, happens at a huge company like Apple. Though the American multinational technology company is certainly in much better shape than Ferrari’s F1 team. So, the picture becomes very clear.
We are talking about longer average turnaround times than the competition, a decision-making system that requires too many “positive” approvals, and ultimately: lethargic, slow, and lacking clearly defined responsibilities. Add to that the absence of a real technical director for many, many years. So: if we combine being not quite up to par and a slow, cumbersome working system, we might begin to explain Ferrari’s current technical disaster.
The example of the World Endurance Championship program seems to indirectly support this argument. It is still Ferrari, but run by an external racing team, with few ties to Formula 1’s Racing Division. Likely only the internal combustion engine unit, the hybrid system, and material usage overlap. Almost everything in the 499P comes from GT, Endurance, and Dallara. Team and resource management are undoubtedly simpler and more dynamic. Some blame John Elkann and Benedetto Vigna. Could be.
But the chairman was the one who strongly wanted Ferrari in the World Endurance Championship, where it wins and convinces. So, what could be the solution? We don’t have the answer—if we did, we wouldn’t be here writing an article. However, when you’ve been losing for this long, you can’t keep thinking you are the best, always self-referential, or that your method is the right one. Someone once said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
So you need the humility to “be nerds.” Go and study how and why others win. And in the most extreme case, transplant the winning people into your structure. Not just two or three. A whole block. Someone mentioned the Benetton block transplanted into Ferrari with Michael Schumacher? If you didn’t say it, you surely thought it. We don’t see any other way. And you? What do you think?
— see video above —
