Ferrari’s miserable 2020 trip to Spa-Francorchamps has been well-documented all weekend, but things hit a new low on Sunday as neither Charles Leclerc or Sebastian Vettel managed to score a single point in the Belgian Grand Prix.
Saturday’s qualifying disaster meant the race was always going to be a difficult one for the Scuderia but did Ferrari just make a bad situation even worse for itself with a series of messy mistakes and strategy calls? Our writers give their verdict.
Edd Straw
Raikkonen shows there is no excuse
The performance of Kimi Raikkonen, who ‘won’ the Ferrari-engined class in 12th place after overtaking Vettel, proves conclusively that the works team didn’t make the most of the weekend. After all, Alfa Romeo has the same engine limitation yet performed better.
And it could have been even worse as the Alfa had the pace perhaps to have beaten a Ferrari or two in qualifying. Raikkonen had a poor first sector on his final lap while Antonio Giovinazzi lost time to a mistake. Then Ferrari would have been beaten hands down on Saturday and Sunday.
Ferrari is a team in disarray. The primary problem is the engine and there’s a huge battle to make a big enough step with it for next year. But internally the team seems fractious and, for whatever reason, there are too many areas where it’s not making the best even of a limited package.
Spa was terrible for Ferrari, but it didn’t need to be quite this bad.
Scott Mitchell
An opportunity thrown away
These kind of difficult weekends are an inevitability in F1 even if Ferrari’s suffered an extreme variant of that. But in such circumstances a team must at least get the maximum available.
Clearly, Ferrari didn’t do that. The team was on the back foot after Friday practice, presumably because it misjudged how aggressive it could get away with trimming out its downforce levels, and the cars were a sitting duck in the race because of the extra wing that was added plus the inherent engine deficit.
But even looking past that, it’s hard to work out what Ferrari’s intentions were in the grand prix.
Leclerc started on softs – he was the only driver with free tyre choice to do that.
This shunted him towards a two-stop strategy that was evidently unfavourable for a car that can’t overtake. Slow pitstops, including having a top-up of pneumatic pressure as a precaution, dropped him even further behind.
Meanwhile, Vettel was left in his now-familiar position of trying to advise Ferrari on strategy and being frustrated at having to wait – then just told to stay out. Which means ‘live with it’, not attack, and settle for at least being the lead Ferrari on-track – albeit in a pretty pathetic 13th place.
Mark Hughes
Bad news as Ferrari heads home to Monza
As in qualifying, this is made to look worse than it has been/will be on more conventional tracks because on a track demanding low drag the Ferrari is hopeless. But it did qualify faster than the Alfa, so logically it should have beaten it in the race.
It clearly wasn’t using it tyres well this weekend as the team tried (in vain) to find a set-up that took it out of the cul-de-sac its combination of low power and high drag put it.
As often happens in racing, a vicious circle set in. It’s good for Ferrari that the Tifosi won’t be allowed in at Monza.
Gary Anderson
Only a miracle can save Ferrari
Mercedes qualified first and second and finished first and second, Ferrari qualified 13th and 14th and finished 13th and 14th. What can you say? This is where Ferrari is when it comes to the performance of the car.
Could Ferrari have done better? Perhaps the odd position was possible, but in reality it finished behind Raikkonen in the customer team Alfa Romeo, which I don’t think anyone would call a competitive midfield car never mind a frontrunner.
Ferrari is deep in it and with Monza coming next weekend, which is an even higher high-speed circuit than Spa, and then comes Mugello – which is similar to Spa downforce and speed levels.
Both of them are home races, with Mugello not far from Ferrari’s Maranello base, and I just don’t see how anything other than a miracle will save Ferrari from being even more embarrassing for its home fans at these two races.
