Ferrari Baby, Stay Cool

As Felipe Massa began to get agitated while waiting to see if the Malaysian Grand Prix would ever restart, his race engineer Rob Smedley came on the radio to reply.

“Felipe baby, stay cool.”

It’s not only Massa who should take heed of these words, but the entire team (apart from maybe Kimi Raikkonen, who leapt out of the car to grab an ice cream as soon as he could!).

It is only two races into the season, but already Ferrari are trying to make more mistakes in the first few races of this season than they did in the entirety of 2008, and that’s a lot.

It seems as we get further away from the Schumacher/Brawn/Todt era, Ferrari is slowly disintegrating into the shambles that preceded it. Perhaps it is just circumstance, but the well drilled pit crew and strategic genius just doesn’t seem to be there anymore.

We witnessed two appalling strategic mistakes this weekend. The first leaving Massa in the pits during qualifying, and the second with Kimi, putting him on wet tyres on a dry track.

It was a gamble, but with the situation Ferrari are in, it should be said it probably wasn’t a gamble worth taking. Get the safe points now, gamble later.

Massa was quoted by autosport.com as saying: “We were not great before [Australia] and stupid now. For sure the car is not strong enough. We need to work on that, and we did some mistakes on the strategy and this kind of thing.”

It feels like they’re beginning to panic, taking risks when they simply don’t need to. They know they’re slower than the double-decker diffuser teams at the moment, but they have the resources to come back. Ferrari has to appear to be remaining calm rather than falling to pieces.

However, the clouds over Ferrari are not as dark as the ones we saw hanging around in Malaysia. Despite the gathering pressure on Stefano Domenicali from Ferrari President Luca Di Montezemolo and the Italian press, he is, at the moment, trying to continue in the same vein as it used to be.

“We have to react immediately. People have to take responsibility for things, from a performance point of view and from a management point of view. This is not acceptable and I do not accept it.”

Massa added, “We need to get together to understand point by point what is going wrong. And, try to improve everything. That is the idea.”

Ferrari are very much capable of turning this season around.  They still have many of the people from the Schumacher era, it’s not like they’ve suddenly forgotten how to run through things systematically.

They are at least still saying the right things. Let’s see whether saying the right things can translate into doing the right things like they used to. They’ve just got to stay cool in the meantime.