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Ferrari should be very happy with the kind of revival it has achieved this season. The team has scored as many as five pole positions this season in seven races and has two wins as well. It is deeply entrenched in the championship battle against Red Bull, with Charles Leclerc taking on Max Verstappen.
After a rather positive start to the season, however, the Scuderia is starting to encounter the same foe that has drowned it in the past: its inability to perform under pressure and make mistakes at the worst time possible.
This foe was responsible for its failed campaigns in 2017 and 2018 and this season, it appears that it has started to affect the team. In this piece, we look at why and how the Prancing Hprse finds itself in this predicament.
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Red Bull has caught up in terms of performance
After the Australian GP, things were looking great as Ferrari held a strong advantage over the field. Meanwhile, Red Bull was on the back foot post-Melbourne! The Italian team's superior race pace was a surprise as the Austrian squad was almost half a second slower. To make things worse, Max Verstappen had then suffered his second retirement of the season in three races, leaving him with a mountain to climb in the standings.
Everything was great until the Imola GP weekend, when Red Bull started turning the tide. The new upgrades helped it make the jump in terms of race pace and that was the key difference that helped Verstappen win the Imola GP sprint as well as the race. Ever since, the Milton Keynes-based outfit has not lost even a single race to Ferrari and is on a 4-race winning streak!
How the last 4 races are reminders of Ferrari’s disastrous 2017 and 2018 seasons
The stinker in this 4-race losing streak is that two of them should have been won by Ferrari. While Charles Leclerc retired from Barcelona with a PU failure, strategic disaster in Monaco put paid to his hopes of a win at his home GP.
The Italian squad has revealed two things in the process. Firstly, it has lost ground to Red Bull in reliability, something it held an advantage in at the start of the season, and secondly, how it was a step behind the Austrian team when it came to making decisions in critical situations.
The way the Italian squad has squandered its early-season advantage will bring in a sense of Deja Vu to the Scuderia fans. The team did just that in 2017 and 2018, when it built a piece of competitive machinery against Mercedes in both of those seasons. As the seasons progressed, however, the German team showed the ability to win the small battles and make continuous small improvements.
In both those seasons, Ferrari lost out to Mercedes in two crucial aspects and paid for it massively. The first was Mercedes' ability to pull away from the Italian squad in terms of performance in the second half of the season.
Despite being very competitive between Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton in the first halves of the 2017 and 2018 seasons, the second halves were a complete shutdown!
The second half of the 2017 F1 season (after the Hungarian GP) featured 1 win for Ferrari, 2 for Red Bull, and as many 6 for Mercedes. The second half of the 2018 season featured 1 win for Red Bull, 2 for Ferrari, and once again 6 for Mercedes. Mercedes was able to gain the upper hand in terms of development while Ferrari could not sustain the level of progress.
The second crucial aspect was Mercedes taking advantage of the Italian team losing the mini battles in the races. Everyone remembers Sebastian Vettel slipping off onto the gravel in the German GP, but they don't remember him losing multiple seconds stuck behind his own teammate just a few laps before that.
They remember Vettel spinning off in Monza 2018, but they don't remember the confusion caused by the two Ferrari drivers fighting against each other at the start of the race. While the Scuderia always suffered from a lack of clarity, Mercedes did not, and by winning the mini-battles within the race, it ended up stretching the advantage.
Red Bull is following the same playbook in 2022. It has overthrown the Prancing Horse's advantage in terms of race pace, as was evident in Imola, Miami, and even Spain. Moreover, Red Bull is a step ahead of everyone else on the grid when it comes to strategic brilliance.
This was the same hurdle that Ferrari could not cross in 2017 and 2018. In 2022, the Italian squad is facing a similar challenge after a gap of 4 years. Whether it can jump this crucial hurdle or not will determine if we will see another intense championship battle this time around or another fading challenge.
