The End of the Road for Ferrari?

We've seen it before: rule changes re-shuffle the field and the 'top' teams are sent backwards. It happens.

Let's look at 2005, where different layouts to race weekends and testing rules throughout the season gave the ever-dominant Ferrari, featuring the Brawn, Byrne, Todt and Schumacher dream-team, a huge wake-up call that complacency will never pay off.

So when Max Mosley, boss of the FIA, and Bernie Ecclestone, the actual boss of the FIA announced that there would be major rule changes, not least of all the banning of major exterior aerodynamic devices for the 2009 season, it increased the never-ending speculation surrounding Formula 1 and its pecking order.

Ferrari were always going to suffer, it was inevitable. Each and every team were looking to capitalise on the effective cost-cuts through lack of development, particularly those with the smaller budgets who saw this as a reset in the playing field and an opportunity to use skill over cash.

And that they did, we all know the glory of Brawn and their dream impact on the field. But it wasn't only the ex-Honda team that benefited, we just hear about this most because they have the most heart-clenching story.

Red Bull, Toyota, Williams, even Force India to an extent have made significant steps forward in terms of competitiveness, leaving Ferrari and initially McLaren trailing in their wake.

We've seen - in a season featuring one of the highest amounts of 'fly-away' races at its opening - what a difference a winter makes.

As we know from Lewis Hamilton's fourth position in last weekend's Bahrain Grand Prix, McLaren have already begun to bite back at its rivals, and are working on establishing itself as F1's fourth most competitive team at this early stage.

Ferrari, meanwhile, are having no such fortune. They ended the pre-season full of confidence (ignoring the apparent dominance of the Brawn in the latter stages of the winter), which, as we saw in Malaysia earlier in the month, can so easily lead to complacency.

So while their biggest rivals of late McLaren finished their final day of testing before Australia downbeat, Ferrari were looking ahead to the race, whiling the time away until they could show what they were truly made of.

McLaren used their lack of pace as motivation - they continued development in the wind tunnel and through other various means of improvement, so that when the Melbourne weekend did finally roll around, they had a car that was wholly better than that of a few weeks before.

The moral result was fourth, tainted only by a disqualification unrelated to performance. Yet despite their 'success', they continued to develop, and Oz wasn't the end result. They introduced an interim diffuser after those of the Brawn, Williams and Toyota were deemed legal, along with various other updates to help set them in the optimum position to make a comeback for May's Spanish Grand Prix.

Ferrari, on the other hand, saw that their performance in the season-opener was not up to standard, and instead of using this as encouragement to push forward with every resource they had to hand, they decided to wait until that Spanish Grand Prix weekend to even think about adding some new parts.

This was their mistake; the team that Ecclestone said provided clowns to the "circus" that was the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix had relied on strategy to keep them competitive. Strategy, this is, that would oppose that of Ross Brawn, the man that helped to bring them six constructors' championships. Strategy to try and beat F1 legends, famed for their quick thinking and clever decisions: Patrick Head, Martin Whitmarsh, Pat Symonds - this was Ferrari pinning all of their hopes on what was their downfall in 2008.

Things got so serious for the team that endured their worst start to a season since 1981, that Ferrari President Luca di Montezemolo even paid a personal visit to the most recent race at Sakhir, just to overlook the team.

It really has gone downhill for Ferrari. As confident as team principal Stefano Dominicali may be, they have lost every opportunity to fight for the championship this year, no matter how successful their updates are in a couple of weeks' time.

Their ignorance, complacency and sheer arrogance has lost Ferrari yet another championship - and that is something I write with a lump in my throat. This is a team that have lost everything that gave me and millions of other fans a reason to support them in the first place.