They didn’t. Neither Alonso nor his team mate Felipe Massa finished higher
than fourth at the season’s first three races. Costa was gonewithin two
months. “This cannot and must not be our level,” Montezemolo
warned.
Given all of the above Pat Fry, the Englishman who has taken over the reigns
from Costa, could be forgiven if he felt some trepidation as he oversees the
design of the 2012 machine.
Fry only arrived at Maranello last winter, after 18 years at McLaren, but
already he has had three jobs within the Ferrari technical team culminating
in his current role as technical director.
“Doing something different is always good,” he says diplomatically. “I was
at McLaren for over 18 years. Ferrari is different but it’s great to
do different things. It’s been a good experience for me.”
So is the team now settled? Somewhat worryingly for Ferrari fans, Fry reports
that the latest reshuffle is not yet complete and that the team is “still
working out” how things will work next year.
“I think we’re slowly getting things in place,” he says, “What I joined
to do was to look and see where we needed to improve. [Ferrari wanted] to
have someone looking across different parts of the organisation without
really a day job as such.
“But then I took over running the race team and now I’ve taken over the
technical director role.
“We’re just working out at the moment exactly how things will work next
year. But hopefully it will give me a little bit more time to think of what
we need to do to make the car quicker.”
“If anything you might say we haven’t been as joined up as we need to be.
So we made a few changes back in May and I think out of that things are
starting to work a bit better.
“We need to make a few more small changes to get things working the way
I’d like to see but I don’t think there will be any major upheaval.”
He had better hope not. This is a results business – nowhere more so than
at Ferrari – and Montezemolo is likely to demand a fast start again
next year.
So is he confident that the car can be quick out of the blocks in 2012? “[The
car] is certainly a reasonable amount different from what we’ve got
now,” he says, weighing his words carefully.
“The question is always: are you doing enough? But at this time of year
how would you ever know? We’re doing as much as we can.
“I think the guys and girls are doing a great job. But we won’t know until
Melbourne next year.”
There have been reports recently that Ferrari’s 2012 machine is more “aggressive”
in its design but Fry points out that ‘aggressive’ is a relative
term.
“I think we’ve taken a few more risks and made bigger changes than we have
in the past,” he says, “but I don’t know how you describe aggressive
really…
“The rules still allow you to do a few things differently but there are
12 teams out there looking at the same set of rules so I would be surprised
if our car ended up looking a whole lot different to anyone else’s.”
Whether Fry is the answer, whether he will be given enough time to be the
answer, remains to be seen.
A softly-spoken man of 47, he does not look as if he is going to pull up trees
but then neither did Brawn. Fry’s calm, rational approach may be just what
Ferrari need.
In 2009, the three-time world champion and former Ferrari driver Niki Lauda
made the following observation about the Scuderia’s glory years in the
early 2000s:
“Ross, because he is English, was the ideal bridge between the Italians,
who all are about spaghetti and romance, and Michael, with his clinical
German efficiency. Now the Italians are running it all. Does it work? It
could be chaos.”
Lauda was being facetious, of course. But stereotypes aside, he had opened up
an interesting debate. Whether by design or not, the years following the
break-up of the Todt-Brawn-Byrne axis at Maranello saw Italians occupy the
top posts; Stefano Domenicali as team principal, Costa as technical director
and so on.
It begs the question; are some nationalities better at performing certain
tasks than others? Perhaps the Latin temperament is superior at fostering a
warm spirit within a team, say? Perhaps the cool, linear Anglo-Saxon brain
is better suited to deciding strategies during the course of a race?
Has Fry been brought in to keep the Italians’ feet nailed to the floor?
To be the ‘bridge’ as Lauda described it?
“I don’t know really,” he says. “I hadn’t really thought about it. There’s
certainly more passion here I would say. I suppose I’m now the constant.
Everyone’s swinging from one extreme to the other and I’m in the
middle, whereas I suppose in the other place [McLaren] it would have been me
doing the swinging maybe.
“But in terms of the quality of the work on the analysis side of things,
it’s very similar to be honest.”
“Ross [was] obviously very organised and methodical. If you plot out the
whole of the 1990s Ferrari’s reliability it was something like 25 per
cent. Then Ross arrived when it stepped up to 90 per cent within six months,
which was quite telling in terms of putting in structural changes to ensure
that.
“You need a logical approach, to keep pushing on the right things, and to
make sure everyone is aligned on that.
“But I don’t see that I have changed the way, fundamentally, that the race
team is working.”
Maybe not. But he had better hope Ferrari get back winning soon. It’s Fry’s
head on the chopping block now.