It was the 2007 F1 Brazilian GP, and Ferrari driver Kimi Raikkonen had just accomplished the impossible by winning the drivers’ title in the last race of the season by just one point. The Finnish driver had moved to the team from McLaren, and in just his first year with the squad, he would end up winning.
This was the last time a Ferrari driver won the championship, and it was 18 years back. Since then, the team has come close a few times but never crossed the line.
Let’s go back to the year 2000, and it is Michael Schumacher crossing the line in the F1 Japanese GP and ending Ferrari’s 21-year drought of a drivers’ championship. That drought makes the current 18-year lean patch look like nothing.
What it also does is that it expose how the lack of success is nothing more than a symptom of a bigger problem. Ferrari is the most successful team in F1 history. Then why are there decades when the team doesn’t win anything? In this video, we’ll take a look at why the sport’s most successful team goes decades without winning anything and is nowhere close to being successful in its current form.
Before we try to understand why Ferrari doesn’t win, it is important to understand what the key ingredients for success are right now. In modern F1, when it comes to achieving success in the sport, a team needs to tick quite a few of the checkboxes. Let’s take a look at what they are.
Framework of building a successful team in modern F1
You first hire a capable leader
The first thing you need to do is hire a leader who has a proven track record in the sport. Someone who knows how you end up winning in F1 and has a track record for success.
If you look at the history of dominance/success in the sport, people like Jean Todt, Christian Horner, Ron Dennis, Flavio Briatore, Ross Brawn, and Toto Wolff have been prime examples of selecting the right leader.
You provide him with the resources he needs to build the team
The second crucial factor is the money involved in running an operation in F1. It is safe to say that you cannot buy success by just throwing money at the team; at the time, you need to hit that minimum threshold to be competitive. Once you’ve hired the leader, you need to make sure that he’s provided with the right resources and investments.
You get the best possible driver that you can
In this jigsaw puzzle, the next step is bringing one of the elite talents of the sport to drive your car. Ron Dennis did so with Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, and Mika Hakkinen, while Christian Horner did so with Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen.
You not only need to build a strong car but also hire a driver who’s good enough to extract the best from it.
Patience!
Arguably, one of the more crucial areas when we talk about winning in F1 is the lack of patience from the board. This was primarily evident in how Otmar Szafneur lost favor with Alpine. After taking the French outfit to the top 4 in 2022 and executing what was a 5-year plan, the Renault board grew restless in just the second year of the project and fired him.
As a consequence, one look at where Alpine is right now in the championship should tell you how poor that decision was. Success in F1 takes time, and no amount of shortcuts are good to help in this.
No interference or politics, let the experts do their thing
Finally, another important cog in the wheel is that you keep the politics out of the team. To win in F1, you need every part aligned in the right direction to succeed. If any of it is distracted, you’re not going to win. You just leave the team boss with the experts and let them do their thing without any disturbance whatsoever.
In essence, this is the framework that almost every team in the modern era of F1 has followed and gone on to dominate the sport at various points.
Now, let’s take a look at why Ferrari spends decades without winning.
Why Ferrari goes decades without winning
When we talk about Ferrari and why the team is not winning, everything is downstream from the fact that the entire operation is essentially controlled by a corporate board. Even in the current avatar, we have John Elkann, the chairman of the board, and Benedetto Vigna, the CEO, continuing to be a prominent presence.
So, why does Ferrari go decades without winning? Let’s take a look.
The board doesn’t know how to run an F1 team
The first major issue that Ferrari has often faced is the fact that the board just doesn’t know what it takes to be successful in F1. Every sport and every discipline has its unique requirements and characteristics that should be understood and respected.
For someone to be successful in the NBA, they need to understand the intricacies of that sport. The same goes with Formula 1. That’s where Ferrari often seems to be a step behind. Just throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve it, especially in a sport like F1, where a lot of things take time.
The board, however, has not shown the capability of understanding that.
Impatience
Here are a couple of statistics that should tell you how far away Ferrari has been from following the right blueprint in F1. From 2005 to 2025, Red Bull had one team boss in Christian Horner. The Italian team, on the other hand, has had six.
Mercedes, from 2010 to 2025, has had two team bosses; Ferrari has had five. When we mentioned that patience is the key to success in F1, it was something that the Italian team has just not followed.
There’s too much politics and interference
In 2006, when it was initially announced that Kimi Raikkonen would replace Michael Schumacher, Jean Todt and Ross Brawn were not in favor of that call. The decision came from Luca di Montezemolo. The result, ultimately, was a disintegration of the dream team as Schumacher retired and others started to leave.
In 2018, there were a lot of political undertones behind the move to displace Maurizio Arrivabene with Mattia Binotto. Within Ferrari, there have been far too many power centers that pull the team to different corners, and that’s just not ideal if you want to win.
Either pick the wrong leader or strip him of his powers
Since Jean Todt left the stage, Ferrari has had a change of personnel at the top for sure, and the number is alarming. What’s more alarming, however, is that a lot of these leaders were just not capable enough. Maurizio Arrivabene did not have a history of running motorsport teams. Binotto was a brilliant technician, but not someone who had shown a capability to run an F1 team at the front.
Then we have Fred Vasseur right now, and the unfortunate reality with him is that he’s constantly being pushed in a direction to fight for his place in the team, so that the primary focus has continued to shift. None of this is ideal because, as the blueprint says, pick the right leader and let him do his thing. Ferrari has, in essence, done neither of them.
An environment of fear
Finally, when you have a team where your team boss has to constantly fight with the media to quash rumors about his future after a blip in form, you can’t expect to be filled with confidence. At Ferrari, the volatile nature of the management rubs off on any prospective employee, and hence either they don’t join, or if they do, there’s an environment of fear that they have to constantly combat, none of which is ideal.
When you look at the blueprint of how you can win in F1 and then look at how Ferrari approaches it, it is quite clear why the Italian squad is where it is right now.
Finally, do we see a light at the end of the tunnel? The answer is no, unfortunately, because if we look at the team right now and how things are functioning, it’s still quite similar to the impediments that have hurt Ferrari’s prospects in the last 18 years.
- There’s still impatience at the senior management
- There’s still a lot of politics as things continue to slip through to the media
- There’s an environment of fear, and even Fred Vasseur’s future is insecure
With Ferrari senior management that includes people like John Elkann and Benedetto Vigna, if it cannot learn the lessons needed to be successful, then it’s hard to expect the future to be much different.
alt=”Charanjot Singh Kohli” height=”72″ width=”72″>
Edited by Charanjot Singh Kohli
