‘Ferrari need to overcome mental block and change work culture’


‘Ferrari need to overcome mental block and change work culture’

Ferrari

Ferrari started the season with a lot of promise. After two disappointing seasons, the car looked much more competitive this year, and quite comfortably among the two best cars on the grid. They won two out of the first three races, and everyone thought that Ferrari were back and that they’ll be fighting for the championship again.

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But then their season derailed. From Imola to Canada, the team won 0 races, despite their car looking like it had better pace. It was reliability and strategy that cost them. What is even more alarming is that Ferrari have not truly had a ‘clean’ weekend since Jeddah, where they finished 2-3.

In Australia, Carlos Sainz had massive trouble with anti-stall at the start of the race, and then made a mistake resulting in him retiring. This year, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz have retired a combined 4 times from mechanical issues. But even in the races where they did not have reliability issues, they were compromised by their own team’s decisions. Ferrari’s former press officer Alberto Antonini thinks that this is not particularly due to incompetency, but because of the current work culture at Ferrari.

Also Read: “They didn’t listen to their driver” : F1 journalists bore witness to Ferrari disappointing Charles Leclerc in the Hungarian GP

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Antonini: The people at Ferrari are under too much pressure

Ferrari
Ferrari

As reported by Planet F1, Alberto Antonini thinks that Ferrari’s missteps result from psychological issues and the immense pressure everyone part of the team is under. He pointed an example to Hungary, where Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc only finished 4th and 6th, despite having started in a good position.

He thinks that Ferrari have too many people involved in the decision-making process, and this leads to confusion and indecision: “At the moment, what we have on the Ferrari wall and in the remote garage is probably too many people. So many people speaking their mind and nobody actually taking the final decision.”

In Hungary, Ferrari had chosen to try and respond to Max Verstappen’s strategy by putting on the hard tires on Charles Leclerc, which would prove disastrous for them. Antonini thinks the car’s performance was not ideal, but: “What is not acceptable is they even failed to get a podium finish. It’s just bad to see Charles finish as low as sixth. This is unthinkable and that shouldn’t have happened.”

According to him, the staff at Ferrari are under too much pressure. Indeed, this is even true for the drivers, as it happened to Charles Leclerc in France, where he was pushing hard in order to recover the delta time, but made a mistake while being unchallenged in the race, which lost him and Ferrari 25 points.

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“It’s probably a matter of culture. I think all the people there are competent, and they have a good build-up. So they don’t need to be under pressure for whatever they do. They have to start to realise, and it has to be the case, that if you make a mistake, if you do something wrong, you don’t necessarily get slashed or you have to leave your job or get sacked – because it doesn’t happen with other teams.”

While this season, the championship seems a lost cause, this season must carry lessons for Ferrari for the future if they hope to return to the top. Their last Constructor’s Championship was 14 years ago, and their last Driver’s Championship was back in 2007, when Kimi Raikkonen won by one point. They must take the lessons learnt to heart.

Also Read: “It does not bring any good to the team” : Jean Alesi urges the Tifosi to stop being so harsh against Ferrari

Also Read: Emerson Fittipaldi deems Ferrari to have ‘great potential for recovery’ in the second-half of the season

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