Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne admitted his team still has much to do following its second win-less campaign in three years.
“Look, 2016 has been a difficult year,” he told media at the team’s factory. “I think we have learned a lot and I think we have been humbled by the success of the other teams and the speed with which they have been able to better their car throughout the season.”
Ferrari lost technical director James Allison in the middle of the season but Marchionne says he has no regrets over the changes.
“We have restructured and I prefer to look to the future in a different way,” said Marchionne. “I don’t regret the choices made, they were well thought out, so there’s no need to change ideas.”
However Marchionne admitted “there are still many things missing”.
“But the team is the team and it was put in place over a period of years and we’re not about to change it now.”
“Our working practice is already different to what it was back in August, which is when Mattia Binotto took over the reins. The organisational change was also partly made to bring some calm. Put in the work and the results will come.”
Marchionne confirmed the team’s 2017 challenger will be revealed on February 24th.
“I’m very, very hopeful about 2017. I’m not going to make any prognostications about how many we’ll win and when we will win. But I know that we couldn’t have tried any harder than we’ve tried so far to bring the car to a successful completion.”
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petebaldwin (@)
20th December 2016, 12:04
Well good luck to them – I hope they get a good start to the season before they “restructure” in the summer.
miki
20th December 2016, 12:07
We should show this to Marchionnie when he comes to races with demanding we should win this race motto, which will any way kick start from Feb 24th the day the 2017 Ferrari challenger comes out.
You certainly dont regret Mr.Sergio hence why you are still failing and will continue.You requires wins to float the shares in stock markets and want to see more money instead of sticking to long term plan and making it work.
When you understand all this you might not be in F1/ Ferrari because they wont understand it any time soon
miki
20th December 2016, 12:08
Yes an Understanding Team Chairman and a bit more knowledgeable Team Principle
Todfod (@todfod)
21st December 2016, 7:45
The guy seems worse than Luca.
GeeMac (@geemac)
20th December 2016, 12:09
That’s a bit of an understatement Mr Marchionne. The biggets thing that is missing at Ferrari is an understanding that success, real sustained success, comes as a result of years of planning and hard work. They need to have a plan, recruit the right people, empower them and give them all the tools they need to succeed and then give them the time they need to see the plan through.
None of these things happen at Ferrari. There is too much pressure on the team, from Marchionne himself, the media and the fans, to allow the team the space they need to build the platform they need to win. Until he gives them space and time, they wont get back to the level they reached under Todt and Brawn.
AntoineDeParis (@antoine-de-paris)
20th December 2016, 12:15
I like his another statement from that day:
“We did not have a successful season, and in 2016 we made a fool of ourselves saying that we had already reached the level of Mercedes.”
Yes, they made a fool of themselves and I think Allison was a big part of this process.
Fer no.65 (@fer-no65)
20th December 2016, 12:30
They just went full italian this year, didn’t they? pressure from the italian media and the directive board got to the core of the team, who panicked at every move after some very bad mistakes, which are all part of the game, really. But with the pressure coming harder and harder, I bet every member of the team felt targeted, as if their next step would be judged and punished every time.
Kinda what happened after Abu Dhabi 2010, when they fired Chris Dyer. It’s their policy, the way they work. Any member makes a mistake, and they all fire shots at him, instead of taking it like a team, and making everyone responsable for every action. With that in mind, they’ll never, ever, return to successful ways, because they just can’t build a team to work in harmony in the long term. Success has to happen now, yesterdey even better!
petebaldwin (@)
20th December 2016, 12:40
Yeah good point. That’s a big problem because if you know you’ll get sacked if you make a mistake, you won’t push the boundaries. Playing it safe doesn’t win you titles.
anon
20th December 2016, 13:31
@fer-no65, I presume that is an allusion to the decision to drop Allison?
If so, it should be noted that some of the media reports which came out suggested a more nuanced picture than the one most people seemed to latch on to, which was to characterise the team as becoming “more Italian” and kicking Allison out as a knee jerk reaction. Rather, the picture was one where it seems that Allison also played his part in the relationship breaking down, with indications that he might not have always been quite as co-operative with the team as portrayed in public.
There were reports that he was effectively only working at Ferrari part time in 2016 as he had been taking a number of extended periods of absence. Since the management structure he had put in place routed a number of key decision through him, the team were beginning to become frustrated that important development decisions were getting delayed.
The issue that seems to have come to a head around the British GP, where Ferrari asked Allison (who was staying at home at the time and was only a few miles from Silverstone) to come to the circuit to go through the telemetry data they’d been collecting in the practise sessions; a request which Allison appears to have rejected.
Effectively, the team were in a situation where they were going to be damned whatever they did – if Allison and the existing management structure had stayed in place, there was the risk that development work for 2017 would have been compromised and I suspect that a number of fans would have bashed them for their poor development work.
Instead, they chose to go down the route of removing Allison and restructuring the team in an effort to try and remove some of those road blocks, knowing that they would in the process be losing an experienced and talented individual. They were going to lose out either way, and it became a question of judging which was going to hurt the least.
As an aside Fer no.65, why is it that similar complaints about continued restructuring and managerial mismanagement aren’t being levelled at McLaren? Over the past few years, we have seen considerable churn amongst the senior management of McLaren – we’ve just had the news that Capito, having only just taken up his role a few months ago, is leaving the team – and two years of sustained infighting between Dennis and Ojjeh, with the former trying to kick the latter out of the team.
miki
20th December 2016, 14:27
Interesting news where did you get this suspected news from never heard of this any where
anon
20th December 2016, 19:48
miki, I am not totally certain about the source since it was some time ago, but I think that it was Auto Hebdo.
Steven Robertson (@emu55)
20th December 2016, 13:05
“I think we have learned a lot and I think we have been humbled by the success of the other teams and the speed with which they have been able to better their car throughout the season.”
This implies to me that the benchmark pace they had been aiming for whilst designing the 2016 car was made redundant by the continued progress of Mercedes and Red bull, though to be fair to them, it cant be easy designing a car package without knowing the required standard for winning a race
MarkM
20th December 2016, 16:10
Ferrari’s F1 employees work in fear, fear will never win. Marchionne is the next generation of fear management, he is proving to be doing a good job at it. RIP Ferrari.