Any Formula One driver worth his salt would like th opportunity to drive for the sports most iconic team. Yet any F1 driver wanting to win something big, should note Ferrari haven’t been at the races in that respect since Kimi Raikkonen pipped both McLaren drivers by one point to the 2007 championship.

Yet Ferrari are on the longest run in their history since winning a constructors’ championship with Michael Schumacher back in 2004. That year was the team’s six consecutive team title but prior to the win in 1999, Ferrari suffered their second longest drought without a trophy since 1950.

Choosing Ferrari has proven to be a risk for a number of F1’s top performers. Fernando Alonso joined the red team for the 2010 season and completed five years in Italy without adding to his two drivers championships. Yet the talks could have been so different.

 

 

 

Alonso 2 near misses with Ferrari

In his first season in Maranello, Alonso was favourite to win the title going into the final race in Abu Dhabi. The Spaniard was eight points clear of Mark Webber in second place after the penultimate round in Brazil and Sebastian Vettel a further seven points behind in third.

With Vettel on pole and Alonso starting P4, it all looked good for Ferrari and Fernando. Yet a poor start from the Spaniard saw him lose places on the first lap, something he wold never recover from. Alonso was forced to trail around behind Vitaly Petrov in P7 for the final 40 laps of the race ad with Vettel claiming victory the championship went to the German by just four points.

Again in 2012, Alonso was in the hunt for the drivers’ championship. This time he was the hunter with Sebastian Vettel ahead by 13 points before the showdown in Brazil. Fernando ran an almost perfect race but was pipped to the win by Jenson Button in his McLaren leaving the Spaniard just three points shy of Vettel whose sixth place finish proved just enough for him to retain his F1 drivers’ title.

Vettel was to replace Alonso at Ferrari in 2015 but that year the Scuderia received a thrashing from Mercedes who won the team championship from Ferrari by a whopping 703-428. Lewis Hamilton claimed his third drivers championship.

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Vettel chances wasted by the Scuderia

However, once again the night of Enzo’s creation once again raised itself like Samson to battle for honours during the 2017 and 2018 campaigns. Yet a com binational of team strategy error, pit stop debacles and mistakes from Vettel saw him come up shy of Hamilton in second place for two years in a row.

Felipe Massa shared his thoughts on life for a top driver at Ferrari  on the occasion of Sebastian Vettel finally leaving the team in 2020. There had been a blame game develop between Vettel’s supporters and Ferrari, something Massa addressed when the German left for Aston Martin.

“Fernando [Alonso] definitely made an incredible job in 2010. He arrived really on the limit fighting for the championship. But maybe, to be honest, the car was not able to win in that year. In my opinion, he did an amazing job,” he told AutoSport.

“All of the drivers that are passing there [since] – Sebastian, Kimi [Raikkonen]- were not able to win because the team was not completely perfect to win the season. So it’s not only related to Sebastian. Sebastian did many great races, he won many races or he fought [for them], and he was always in front of his team-mate – even a good team-mate and champion like Kimi.”

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Ferrari is always a “risk” of a move

Moving to the most famous team in F1 is always a risk as drivers have proved over the year’s since Kimi made the leap and won in his maiden season.

Lewis Hamilton now speaks of the Ferrari “risk” but while recognising it exists he suggests in his case there was nothing to lose. Hamilton who turned 40 earlier this month had the worst season in the sport during his swan song with Mercedes last year. Whilst he broke his duck of race wins for almost three years, the British driver finished seventh in the driver standings and once again behind junior team mate George Russell who whipped him 19-5 in Grand Prix qualifying.

Yet the risk of moving to Italy alongside ferry’s homegrown boy Charles Leclerc is not without its potential pitfalls. Yet Lewis believes it was more ‘risky’ to stay with Mercedes than to take a leap of faith with Ferrari. 

“I knew that signing with Ferrari was the right move for me and that it would give me the challenge I needed”, Hamilton says on LinkedIn’s “Get Hired” newsletter. “Ultimately, every new opportunity is a total leap of faith.

“None of us can predict the future so changing jobs, or in my case teams, is always going to come with some level of risk. But I believe there’s more of a risk in staying somewhere you’re comfortable and in getting complacent,” explained Hamilton.

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Hamilton one lap turnaround required

Lewis goes on to explain he had a “gut feeling” knowing the move to Ferrari “was the right move for me and that it would give me the challenge I needed. There are so many incredible people in the team that I can’t wait to work with, and I have total faith that we’ll achieve great things together.”

Ferrari too are not underestimating the challenge ahead for them to integrate Lewis successfully into what is an established unit of race engineers. Hamilton will be given the maximum of testing of previous cars a full time driver is allowed under the current rules and these 1000k will be completed during a relaxed programme across several days in February at the home of the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona.

Hamilton’s risk was indeed greater than he lets on. Mercedes believed there were signs of “shelf life” issues with the seven times world champion and were lining up their protege in Kimi Antonelli. This together with Lewis persistent public complaints about the car and the team were not going down well and it could be Hamilton’s career would onward in fact be over given he was guaranteed racing for the silver arrows for just the 2024 campaign.

Now Lewis is secure with a three year deal agreed with the Scuderia, all thats left is for him to disprove his own observation to Sky F1 in Brazil. “I’m just not fast anymore” he complained after qualifying in just P16 while his team mate was a whisker behind Lando Norris on pole position.

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Bottas Sponsor SHOCK ‘bad boy’ revelations

Valtteri Bottas for now has exited Formula One having been given the vote of no confidence by the Audi masters who control the Kick Sauber team. Both he and team mate Zhou Guangu were given there marching orders as the German powers that be chose the impressive Nico Hulkenberg and Ferrari academy driver older lang with current F2 champion Gabriel Bortoleto as their driver line up for the coming season.

The Finnish driver ran a social media campaign over the final race weekends of 2024, enticing his fans as to the future with the slogan “What next?” Of course what happened next was almost entirely predictable as Bottas returned to Mercedes as their chief reserve driver replacing the departing Mick Schumacher.

Of course as reserve driver there is always the potential for one of the fun time pilots to become unavailable as evidenced by Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz in 2023 and 2024 respectively with appendicitis. Franco Colapinto was the Williams reserve and on the sacking of Logan Sargeant he was awarded the final nine Grand Prix weekends of last season… READ MORE