![]() ![]() Perhaps it was.īut we shouldn't get too excited on all of this. For someone like Seb - one who among other things lauds Michael Schumacher - it could have been designed to wound. #Ferrari f1 2017 driverThen a rift with his immediate boss Maurizio Arrivabene got public, with the latter stating his driver should stick to the driving instead on sticking his nose into team running. It all left some to wonder, with minds on 2014 as well, that while Seb gets the absolute maximum out of a good situation perhaps in difficult situations he doesn't keep up his own end of the bargain. His driving got a little scrappy, particularly in the opening corners of races, some of his personal behaviour got tetchy, and oddly too he appeared to lose his qualifying talisman with his team mate Kimi Raikkonen actually ending up ahead on the quali count. And for Seb the transition seemed a painful one. With it any sense of his charmed existence ended abruptly. ![]() But rather than the anticipated championship charge he became just the latest to discover the tendency for hopes down Maranello way to be dashed. With that, even with what came next, our views of his campaign would be very different. It's easy to forget that without rather glaring pit wall errors Sebastian Vettel could have had three race wins from the first half of the 2016 F1 season. And McLaren boss Eric Boullier probably got closest of all: "The Ferrari is surprising and people were not expecting Ferrari to be matching Mercedes's lap times." In terms of performance, still too early to tell but by the looks of it we still need to find a decent chunk, so there's a lot of work ahead."īut at the very least we can say that Ferrari has improved, which is just as well as the fallout of another disappointing season would likely have us hiding behind sofas. While false dawns are far from unheard of in Maranello in the opening test a year ago indeed Ferrari was fastest on three of the four days.Īnd Vettel was suitably cautious in his words about the SF70H: "By the looks of it the car is working, we don't have any major issues. In previous years the major part of Ferrari's deficit lay in qualifying that rather than in general running. #Ferrari f1 2017 fullFerrari usually runs lower fuel than Mercedes in testing, plus it's thought the silver squad hasn't been running its engines on full chat. It translated to lap times too as Sebastian Vettel's fastest mark was just a quarter of a second off Valtteri Bottas's table-topping pace and was done on soft rubber rather than the Mercedes's ultra-soft. "Mario Andretti used to say that the ground-effect Lotus 79 he won the 1978 world championship in was painted to the road, and that's exactly what the Ferrari looked like." "The Ferrari simply looked like the best car out there" stated an observing Gary Anderson. #Ferrari f1 2017 driversThe car could be seen going precisely where the drivers wanted and almost never got out of line even on full throttle. Most importantly the red car looked superb on track in testing, on all tyre compounds and all programmes seemingly. ![]() There's solid talk too of a bold new piston design. And the launched car appeared purposeful, with interesting innovation most notably in its sidepod shape but also in the bargeboards and the front of the floor. The team resisted any temptation to head hunt after its hollowing out of its technical team last year, and instead backed the people it had (with Rory Byrne brought out of hibernation). Marchionne learned at last it seemed that he should pour oil on troubled waters. "I think we learned our lessons from the past years" noted Kimi Raikkonen in Barcelona testing, not for nothing. On Marchionne's orders barely a peep has been heard from Maranello this winter, and whaddayaknow, the Ferrari machine the team's come up with looks a good one. The team appears to have embodied the Italian phrase on their caps, translating as that one should keep their feet on the ground and their head down. This year, in its early days the exact opposite is happening it seems, in both senses. Its abrasive president Sergio Marchionne spoke of championships, but the car was a desperate disappointment and the team unravelled. Twelve months ago much bombast emanated from the Scuderia. ![]()
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