Lewis Hamilton & Co’s Magical Recovery Shoved Down Ferrari’s Throat as $135,000,000 Excuse Turns Irrelevant

It’ll be hard to believe that Ferrari is the most successful constructor in F1 history, given its performances in the past few seasons. At the beginning of the 2022 season, the Maranello-based team looked like it had sorted out its issues of past years. The season started with wins and podiums, and Charles Leclerc was a title contender. Until he wasn’t. Due to driver errors, bad strategy calls, and mechanical failures, Ferrari lost hope even before half the season was over. And since then, they have struggled to return to their winning form. This season doesn’t look much better, and they are barely holding on to P4 in the Championship, fighting against Mercedes and Aston Martin for P2.

Talking about Mercedes, it was on a mission at the Spanish GP. With new upgrades, Lewis Hamilton in P2 and George Russell in P3 gave the team its first double podium of the season. When the season started, the W14 was probably the third-best car—closely following Aston Martin. But after its upgrades in Barcelona, it was miles ahead of Ferrari and Aston Martin. With upgrades in the works for all three teams, it’s safe to say the fight for P2 in the Championship is only getting started.

Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes’ performance a much-needed wake-up call for Ferrari

Ferrari has been using the excuse of the budget cap imposed by the FIA for their slow development for far too long. The FIA implemented the cost cap in 2021 to limit teams’ spending and to level the playing field. And in 2023, FIA has limited spending to $135 million. While the budget hasn’t seemed to affect Red Bull too much (even though they were penalized for overspending), it has affected teams like Mercedes and Ferrari, who have had to cut down on their spending drastically.

Upgrades aren’t meant to change an entire car. They’re brought in to improve the car one step at a time. But with its Spanish GP upgrades, Mercedes looks like a new car altogether without having changed its entire chassis and staying within the cost cap. According to Gazzetta.it, “If Mercedes was able to turn the situation around, the Red [Ferrari] must do it too.” What Mercedes has done to improve its car has made Ferrari’s excuses about the budget cap seem irrelevant. 

Looking at Mercedes, Ferrari hopefully will start making changes for the better. Even though they don’t have a technical director at the moment, according to Gazzetta.it, “[Frederic] Vasseur spoke of about 90 people leaving the Scuderia and at least 120 arrivals, a positive balance that he hopes to translate into a surplus of knowledge and, above all, ideas.” Amidst this challenging period at Maranello, Team Principal Vasseur is trying to manage expectations and improve performances.

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Ferrari, too, came into the Spanish GP with a few upgrades, looking to make it a memorable home race for their driver, Carlos Sainz. But they didn’t work as well as Ferrari had hoped.

Ferrari’s Spanish GP upgrades weren’t any good

Although Carlos Sainz kept up his 100% point-scoring record at his home race with a P5 finish, it wasn’t much consolation after he started on the front row alongside pole-sitter Max Verstappen. Ferrari had been talking about its Spanish GP upgrades for a while, with Leclerc telling The Race that the upgrades “should help us to not gain that much performance but at least be a bit more consistent throughout the weekend, which will hopefully help us to have a better result on the Sunday.”

The updates were supposed to facilitate consistency throughout the weekend, but that wasn’t the case. Leclerc qualified a lowly P19, while Sainz qualified P2. But Sainz’s qualifying pace did not translate into race pace, as he finished 45 seconds behind the winner. While Vasseur was hopeful of the upgrades in Barcelona, he knows “it won’t be the end of the development of the car.”

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Will Ferrari toughen up and work towards developing their car to fight for P2, or will it continue making excuses and remain a ghost of its former, glorious past?