In the long history Ferrari in F1, it was a life that a season didn’t start with this year’s overwhelming pace thanks to a team built on non-noble foundations. In 1990 the prospect opened almost immediately towards the title, but at the wheel there was a certain Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell on the other Red. In 1997 it was a great fight in the world championship, but Michael Schumacher already had two world championships won with Benetton in his book. Same number of world championships for Fernando Alonso, when in 2010 he lost the title only in the last race in Abu Dhabi. And for Sebastian Vettel, who won his second race in red in Malaysia in 2015, there were even four titles in the palmarès.
The Cavallino of this early 2022 instead recalls another of Maranello’s historic seasons: that of 1974, when a flurry of pole positions and three exceptions in isolated weekends) of the past two seasons. Everything has been said about this Ferrari. It comes from a two-year swamp announced, after being found not exactly in the act, but still in a limping position at the regulatory level, at the end of 2019. The stakes imposed by rules and budget caps have made it completely impossible to dare something new in the last two years. and the team had the clarity and coolness to resist the wave of resigned criticism, to focus on a future that could not have started before this year and to put the single-seater and the engine into the construction site in advance that between Bahrain, Jeddah and Australia they taught how to win and two sacred monsters like Red Bull and Mercedes.
Enzo Ferrari and Mauro Forghieri also built something similar in view of 1974. They designed a 312B3 that was immediately different from its progenitor and chiseled around it 12 cylinders of 500 horsepower able, then, to shoulder the Ford Cosworth V8 that pushed almost all the competition. And they did not go looking for red carpet riders: they brought Clay Regazzoni back to Maranello, who had already won for Drake four years earlier in Monza, and they staked a lot on the bet Niki Laudaa 25-year-old Austrian (therefore a young man, for those times) with almost no art or part, except for a day of heroism in the wet in Monte Carlo which, it is said, fascinated Ferrari in front of the television.
To crown this similarity 48 years later, there is also Charles Leclerc who is somewhat reminiscent of that young Lauda. Many aspects of the winner of Sakhir and Melbourne are striking: the almost unbeaten run on the flying lap, the very chapter in which Niki began to show what he was made of; total integration into the team, from the technical phase to the ability to execute perfect strategies and tactics; the clarity and the perfect vision of the details during the race. Of that Lauda, and even more than that of 1975 when he dominated the championship from above with the 312T, Mauro Forghieri recalls: “If you gave him a car capable of winning, Niki would win. There is not much more to say “. Very few exceptions, almost never determined by pilot errors. Everything under control. Charles remembers him very much today.
Wanting to insist on comparisons half a century later, there is also something to be said about Carlos Sainz. He is fast too, often very fast. Strong of a rare performance repeatability, for a driver who has not yet won. Gritty, tough in the melee, muscular but with a long-range vision. In his case, however, we cannot speak of zero errors. The exit from the track after six kilometers of the race in Australia burns like a wound. He was impatient, down there in the middle of the group where a personal mistake and a lot of bad luck had precipitated him in qualifying. There was not much to be found with the harder compound tires that he had chosen with the team to do many laps and recover positions thanks to the earlier pit stops than the others. But it was a predictable situation: he required patience, first of all; and perhaps this was missing, if we count that immediately before going off the track he had created a record sector.
Here: if Leclerc recalls the imperturbable and dominant Lauda of 1975, Carlos recalls the Niki of the previous year. Very high potential, many small treble but still without the winning view from above. And a few burrs here and there. But she has time to learn. And a model, in the team, from which to learn the last details necessary to rise to the chair.
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