Ferrari

Just how good is Fernando Alonso?

Currently, he is sharing the championship lead in the 2012 Formula One season and no one can adequately explain why.

Or can they?

Okay, a guy with two world championships under his belt is obviously not a complete dud, but I suspect we can all name drivers who secured a world championship more by virtue of the car they were in, rather than their ability to drive it.

Even Felipe Massa almost achieved it in 2008!

On the flip side, we can all name drivers who should have won a championship, but never did—Stirling Moss being the obvious example.

So world championships are not a perfect measure of driver ability although, to be fair, the best drivers do get the opportunity to drive the best cars.

A better measure is perhaps how they perform in a substandard car.

Ayrton Senna made his name wrestling his Toleman to points and podium finishes in his inaugural 1984 season thus securing his seat in a Lotus.

Michael Schumacher secured third place in the 1992 championship with a conventional Benetton-Ford against Williams cars with the superlative Renault engine, semi-automatic gearboxes and active suspension.

This year Alonso is doing the same with a car that arguably isn’t worthy of the prancing horse badge on its nose.

This season, he has finished every race in the points, a feat only equaled by Lewis Hamilton, and has managed to win the rain affected Malaysian Grand Prix and pulled a brilliantly driven second place in Spain.

The car that he is driving is far inferior to the McLaren and Red Bull cars and has been outperformed by Mercedes, Renault, Sauber and Williams. Ferrari made a big step forward in Spain, but still Alonso is not competing on a level playing field.

While his talent is on show for all to see, he is not without some rough edges.

He can be something of a prima donna, and it’s not uncommon to see him gesticulating wildly at anyone who gets in his way—as Charles Pic found out at the Spanish GP.

And who can forget him driving around Abu Dhabi behind Vitaly Petrov in 2010? His frustration was on public display as his championship chances simply evaporated as the then Renault driver held him at bay and he finished four points behind Sebastian Vettel.

He brake-tested a Red Bull test driver Robert Doornbos in free practice at the 2006, but recently had the gall to complain that F1 drivers don't show each other enough on-track respect.

Alonso has managed to get himself caught up in some of the sports’ biggest controversies over the past few years. From “crashgate” in Singapore, to “spygate” (why do we insist on putting “-gate” on the end of anything with a hint of conspiracy about it?) between McLaren and Ferrari, Fernando has been front and centre, but no mud has managed to stick.

Perhaps having Flavio Briattore as a manager doesn’t give him the best role model to aspire to.

He also has a reputation for not playing well with others. His 2007 season at McLaren was overshadowed by his rivalry with a glamorous rookie by the name of Lewis Hamilton. Alonso maintained that Hamilton was receiving preferential treatment from the team.

His personality seems to demand that he be the undisputed No. 1 driver in whatever team he blesses with his presence. He had that at Renault and has it now at Ferrari.

Perhaps that’s the reason that there is a huge disparity between himself and the other driver in the team. For the past two seasons, Alonso has finished over 100 points ahead of teammate Felipe Massa.

Okay, Massa’s performance doesn’t set a particularly high benchmark, but this year he is 59 points ahead after only five races!

And that, after all, is the point.

He may have almost no chance of maintaining his lead too far into this season, but he won’t stop trying and no-one on the grid will underestimate him.

Despite being lumbered with what is unquestionably an inferior car, he manages to get the very best possible performance out of it every race.

That’s what teams need, that’s what makes a champion and that’s what makes Fernando Alonso one of the most formidable drivers ever to sit in an F1 car’s cockpit.

By now, the the message must have sunk in at Ferrari, and not even the balmy Bahrain spring weather will be able to thaw the chill that comes with the awful realisation that the Prancing Horse is no longer a threat on the Formula One grid.

Ignoring the aberration of Malaysia—where a combination of rain and possibly witchcraft delivered Ferrari an unlikely and ultimately inexplicable victory—the Maranello team are struggling to remain competitive.

While they have been a top-three team for most of the last two decades, this year the reality is much darker. They aren’t even top five. They’re possibly seventh fastest.

While McLaren and Red Bull have clearly had the edge over the past few years, now Mercedes, Lotus, Sauber and probably even Williams have surpassed them.

Ferrari, however, have everything covered.

After the Chinese GP, Ferrari Technical Director Pat Fry told ESPN F1, "The result does not represent the car's true potential in race configuration but we have to accept it. We lack performance, we know it, but there is no point in beating ourselves up over it: rather we need to concentrate all our efforts on improving car performance.”

There’s probably a little bit of room for them to beat themselves up. The fact that the team is now battling with teams like Force India, Torro Rosso and even Caterham has to be particularly galling. With no time to bring in upgrades, the pain looks to continue at this week's Bahrain race.

Their performance drop-off is quite remarkable.

While no-one is surprised that Red Bull took a big hit from the regulation changes—their revolutionary blown diffuser being a cornerstone of their success—Ferrari had reportedly stopped working on their 2011 car early to focus on this year’s model.

As early as August 2011, team boss Stefano Domenicali was excited about what they were producing. “What I can say, having seen the model in the wind tunnel and the work going on in the drawing office, is that it will be a very innovative machine," he told the F1 Times. "In fact, this is to be expected, this is necessary given that our first goal is that, in 2012, we must be competitive right from the very start of the season.”

The confidence continued through the preseason with Domenicali lauding the car at the team’s 2012 launch and boldly claiming to the Daily Mail, “I am sure our car will be winning right from the beginning. We have learned many lessons from the past and taken some difficult decisions. But I am sure all our efforts will be represented with this car.”

As Max Smart might say, “missed it by that much.”

The interesting thing to come from all this is that this dog of a car may well be letting Felipe Massa off the hook.

It could be that he’s actually driving the car just about as well as it can be driven, and it’s only Fernando Alonso’s superior talent and tactical ability that has the car anywhere near the front of the pack.

I’m just kidding, Massa’s ongoing poor form is hurting the team almost as much as the slow car.

Despite that, it may be Alonso who is the biggest problem for Ferrari. He's too good a driver to waste his time in an uncompetitive car and even though he has a contract out to 2016, there's bound to be a get-out clause if he needs it. Red Bull may be looking for a driver next year.

On top of everything else, the car is also hideous to look at. This is an unforgiveable sin for a Ferrari.

Domenicali writes this off with, “The fact that it's ugly or very nice doesn't count a lot, the most important thing is the car has to be performing.”

That’s absolutely true, but if you can’t achieve the latter, you may as well give the fans something pretty to look at.

If rumours of Sauber’s Sergio Perez being in the frame to replace the hapless Felipe Massa at Ferrari are even close to being true, then the Mexican speedster may well just added a couple of extra dollars onto his potential contract, with a well-constructed and emphatic second place at the Malaysian Grand Prix.

Perez was in a position to win the race before a small mistake saw him run wide with a handful of laps remaining. While he caught the car before disaster struck, he gave Alonso enough breathing room to secure his against-the-odds victory.

The fact that Sauber rely on Ferrari engines is almost certainly a coincidence.

Fernando Alonso put Massa’s discomfort into stark contrast, when he took a confused and eventful race by the scruff of the neck and won against all odds.

It was a performance that again underscored Alonso's brilliance and worthiness of his two world championships. By contrast, his teammate merely reminded us of his comparative mediocrity.

While rain has always been a great equaliser in Formula One racing, it would have taken a brave, or perhaps drunk, prognosticator to have picked Alonso—in the current Ferrari—to have emerged from the pack to secure an emphatic victory.

Massa, by way of contrast, finished in a rather distant fifteenth place behind Jenson Button—who lost his front wing and had front tyre punctures after a collision with Narain Karthikeyan.

To add insult to injury, Sebastian Vettel also had a run-in with Karthikeyan picking up a puncture when the Hispania driver really didn’t bother getting out of the way while being lapped, slicing into Vettel's rear tyre causing a spectacular failure.

The topsy-turvy nature of the race was reflected elsewhere, with last week’s top-two place-getters stranded outside of the points, Force India being the only team to finish with two cars in the points and Bruno Senna finishing sixth in a Williams.

While Button and Vettel had a bad day, the big story is that Alonso took a car widely regarded as fifth- or sixth-best on the grid to a victory and now leads the championship, whereas as his teammate finished well out of the points—again.

Of course, no one is silly enough to believe that this win changes anything for Ferrari. Alonso himself, sporting his ridiculous soul patch and in a rare moment of post-race interview honesty, admitted that the race is no indicator of where the Ferrari really is and there is a lot of work to do between now and the race and China.

McLaren are still the pacesetters and reigning champions Red Bull are going to have to work very hard to close the gap.

The race also changes nothing for Massa. His season was in deep trouble—for want of a better word—before this race and the trouble only got deeper today.

The desperate measure of flying out a new chassis did nothing for his performance during practice, qualifying or the race. Given that his teammate won in an apparently identical car, Massa’s failure can be put down to only one thing—his driving ability.

This F1 season is shaping up as an absolute cracker.

In what seems to be a desperate move, Ferrari are flying out a new F2012 chassis to Malaysia for Felipe Massa.

Apparently, they just want to eliminate the remote possibility that it wasn’t some imperceptible flaw in his existing chassis that was responsible for his dreadful performance in Melbourne (insert raised eyebrow here).

It comes as no surprise to Formula One fans that Ferrari’s 2012 car is absolute rubbish. Ferrari themselves have been telling anyone who would listen not to expect too much from the car for at least the first half of the year.

After the Australian Grand Prix, there was no longer any doubt that it wasn’t all part of some elaborate rouse to outsmart their competitors.

It turns out that they lulled everyone in to an actual sense of security.

But if we accept that the car is as bad as Ferrari have been telling us, then how can we account for the disparity between Fernando Alonso and Massa.

In qualifying, Massa barely made it into the second period of qualifying, whereas Alonso looked on target to get into the top 10—until he parked it in the gravel, that is.

Alonso delivered the car home for a very creditable fifth place. Massa, after playing dodgem cars at the back of the field, damaged his car and didn’t finish the race. At least Lewis Hamilton wasn’t around to take the blame.

Of course, Alonso was a little lucky to secure fifth and had to rely on a bit of attrition. The fact remains, however, that he delivered against the odds—something that Massa no longer seems capable of.

Team boss Stefano Domenicali, and Technical Director Pat Fry returned to Maranello for crisis talks. A major part of those discussion would have revolved around the car, but it’s difficult to believe that Massa’s complete absence of form didn’t come up at some point.

On the car front, there’s only two main issues—speed and traction.

That should be easy to fix!

With Massa, however, it seems that patience is running out. Bringing in a new chassis smacks of desperation, and while they’re keen to be seen standing by their man, you can’t help get the feeling that somewhere a knife is being sharpened.

The Italian press has already anointed former driver Jarno Trulli as the likely successor according to YallaF1.com.

Trulli has two things in his favour. One, he’s Italian, which always helps at Ferrari and, two, he’s available. As an aside, hiring Trulli would also redress the fact that F1 currently doesn’t have an Italian driver on the grid for the first time since 1969.

But it’s hard to see how hiring Trulli would be that much of an advantage over Massa. The fact that he currently doesn’t have a drive tells you all you need to know.

The reality is that while Alonso pulled out a creditable performance, it was overly flattering and Ferrari has a long way to go. Not all of the blame can be laid at the feet of the drivers.

Massa is a liability to the team on current (and last year’s) form. It’s one thing to have a clear No. 1 driver, but the other bloke needs to know what he’s doing to help develop the car.

At the moment, Ferrari need all the help they can get.

The 2012 Formula 1 seasons starts in Melbourne, Australia. This time next week it will all be over. How are the teams looking ahead of the new season?

Here we look at the legends: Ferrari.

Ferrari had a good car in 2010, but has struggled to keep up with Red Bull and McLaren since. Last year, they failed to get onto the front row of the grid until the Canadian grand prix, which was round seven.

There's nothing to suggest 2012 will be much different.

The positive is that the problems with the 2012 car are understood to some degree. Put bluntly, they are struggling to get the most out of the Pirelli tyres.

The employment of Hirohide Hamashima, a former Bridgestone development director, should be beneficial. But the other engineering changes that Ferrari made through 2011 will bear the main responsibility of putting the Maranello team at the head of the pack.

Fernando Alonso is a stunning Formula 1 driver, some say he's the best and his form in 2011 showed us just what he can do. His starts in both Barcelona and Monza were perfect, on both occasions he exploded from fourth on the grid to lead into the first corner.

This was pure racing instinct and shows that Fernando has lost none of his speed and precision as he's aged over the years. Now 30, he's not won a championship for five seasons. He's been close, but it's the winning that matters. The Spaniard has chosen Ferrari as the team that can give him a car to add the one more championship he needs to equal his hero Ayrton Senna's three.

With Ferrari's current form, he's only likely to gain the seven podiums he needs to equal Senna's tally of 80.

Felipe Massa is on borrowed time at Ferrari. He had a brilliant season in 2008 but a difficult car and his big accident at Hungary in 2009 stopped his run of success in its tracks.

His best result last year was fifth while his team-mate scored ten podium finishes. Many were surprised that Massa was given one more year but perhaps he was saved by the lack of suitable alternatives.

Ferrari have rarely put inexperienced drivers in their cars, indeed after Massa's crash in '09 they looked to Michael Schumacher, Luca Badoer and then Giancarlo Fisichella as replacements.

Maybe the team needs to look seriously at drivers like Sergio Perez and Paul di Resta as possible replacements for next year.

When the Caterham CT01 was launched, it became clear 2012 would not see the most beautiful cars.

With an ugly stepped nose and humps, it surpassed even the Williams-Walrus of 2004 as one of the most ghastly creations to ever leave an F1 factory.  Some quite accurately said it resembled a platypus, while I immediately thought of the gharial—a small crocodilian from the Indian subcontinent.

The step was due to a change in the regulations which stated the nose must be lower than on previous cars, but the height of the front bulkhead remained unchanged.  Caterham's solution was to draw inspiration from a child's animation of an earthquake.

The news that most teams would follow suit filled aesthetes the world over with dread.  The Ferrari was reported to have a hump on its nose and had been called ugly by the Italian press.

But when McLaren unveiled their challenger on February 1st, it appeared that not all was lost.  The English team usually make attractive cars, and the MP4-27 was beautiful.  They already ran with a lower front end prior to the change, so it didn't need to drop down so drastically.

The result is that the nose is without a hump, step or bump, and while the rear of the car tapers inwards in a rather unattractive manner, it doesn't detract from the overall appearance.  Things were looking up.

Then Ferrari and Force India launched their cars on February 3rd.  Oh dear.

The Ferrari F2012 features a flatter step than the gharial-eyed Caterham, which only serves to reinforce the unappealing look.  Hammering the nail into the coffin, the support struts holding the front wing in place are very bulky and the nose looks too blunt to ever be called beautiful.

The back end looks tidier, and the sculpting for the additional air intake on the engine cover is a nice touch, but the overall result is still painful on the eyes. 

Force India's VJM05 went for a design very similar to Caterham and made it 3-1 to the stepped noses.  Lotus will launch on February 5th, followed by three further teams—including Red Bull—on the 6th.

Can we at least count on Adrian Newey to produce an attractive car?

Probably not, but there's no harm in hoping.

With the season-opening Australian Grand Prix now less than two months away, the time has come for Formula One's giants to come out of hibernation and reveal their latest machines. 

Unfortunately for Ferrari, the excitement surrounding the launch of their new car for the 2012 season, scheduled for the 3rd of February at the team's Maranello base, has been dampened by a flood of information released in the Italian press.

Italian Technical Illustrator, Giorgio Piola, was the first to reveal the information, before detailed drawings of the new car appeared in Autosprint.

Perhaps the biggest performance-related revelation so far, according to those sources, is that the new Ferrari will feature a pull-rod suspension system—a clear attempt to mirror what Red Bull have been using since 2009. 

The car is also reported to have at least two very different visual features. A new dipped nose cone, designed to meet the new requirements for front wings in 2012, is said to have a 'hump' in it—a feature that is likely to change the look of the car significantly. The sidepods on the car will also be much higher than in previous years.

So, will we really be looking at a hideous Ferrari in 2012?

Ferrari president Luca di Montezemelo has already described the car as being "ugly," with team principal, Stefano Domenicali, seeming to agree with him, saying the car will be "really extreme."

One thing is certain: if the new car wins Ferrari the World Championship Title, no one at the team will care about how the car looks as it crosses the finish line.