Andrew Benson : Grand Prix
Gustav Brunner quit his job as a designer at Ferrari’s Formula One team this year to become technical director of back-of-the- grid Minardi, but the 47-year-old Austrian still passes the Ferrari factory in Maranello on his way back to his apartment. “They are working very hard at Ferrari these days,” he says.
“Sometimes I drive past the factory at 10 o’clock on a Friday evening, and the lights are still on.”
Two years ago, you would have been hard pressed to find many people working at Ferrari past six, but the most famous team in motor racing have come a long way since then, even if 1998 looks set to end as yet another season of unfulfilled promise.
Ferrari said in January that they would have failed this year if they did not win the World Championship. With two races to go, Michael Schumacher – who won last weekend’s Italian Grand Prix to tie with McLaren driver Mika Hakkinen at the top of the log – may stand a chance of winning Ferrari’s first drivers’ title since 1979. Schumacher was able to win due to McLaren’s hitting technical troubles.
First Hakkinen, who had started in the spare car after an engine problem during the warm-up, immediately encountered a handling imbalance which obliged him to relinquish the lead to his team mate David Coulthard in the seventh lap. Coulthard was on his way to win, only to be stopped with an engine failure in lap 17. Hakkinen and Schumacher arrived to find the road apparently blocked by a smoke-screen, and the German managed to edge himself into the lead. The Finn was forced out of the race completely seven laps from the end when he went into a spin caused by a serious brake problem.
But if Ferrari’s words were premature, behind them lay the realisation that, at last, they have re-established themselves as a top grand prix team. They finished one-two on Saturday, with Eddie Ervine coming in second, and Schumacher’s younger brother Ralf finishing strongly in third in his Jordan-Honda.
When Schumacher first drove for Ferrari in 1996, they were still struggling to drag themselves out of the morass of organisational chaos left by founder Enzo Ferrari’s death in 1988. In 1991, after a succession of managers from Ferrari’s parent company Fiat had failed, Luca di Montezemolo, a well-bred Fiat protg who had led the team to success with Niki Lauda in the mid-Seventies, was put back in charge.
He re-employed the Englishman John Barnard, who had worked with Ferrari with some success from 1986 to 1989, to design the team’s cars.
This time, though, it did not work. Politics, factions and bureaucracy riddled the factory. The team was in chaos, with Barnard designing the cars in Surrey and sending the designs over to Maranello. “It was ridiculous,” says a former Ferrari engineer. “You would have Barnard working in one direction, and people in Maranello working in another just to prove him wrong, so a lot of the development done in Maranello was not even used.” By 1996, Di Montezemolo had had enough and decided to bring all the design under one roof in Italy. He realised that the team needed the best possible aerodynamic design facilities, so he authorised the building at Maranello of the best wind tunnel in Formula One. It is just becoming operational now.
The highly respected operational manager Jean Todt was already at Ferrari, and in 1996 he hired, on huge salaries, Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne, the technical director and chief designer of Benetton, who had just won two world titles with Schumacher.
Ferrari has always had as much money as they needed, but with the Benetton pair in place it was being spent in the right places. The differences are beginning to show this year. Ferrari runs much like any other Formula One team, even if they have not yet dragged themselves up to the standards of the best English teams.
Insiders say there is still discontent – jealously at the some of the salaries and concern that many newcomers are in it for themselves rather than for Ferrari. But as long as Schumacher is winning races, all this is forgotten.
That matters little to the tifosi, the fanatical fans of what is effectively Italy’s national Formula One team. They are as committed to Ferrari as any football fans are to their national team, and however many times Ferrari fail, and however much controversy surrounds Schumacher – labelled “crazy” in a front- page headline on the national sports daily Gazzetta dello Sport following his abuse of Coulthard during the Belgium Grand Prix – they will turn up in their hundreds of thousands at Monza every year.
Fiat’s support is also guaranteed. The glamour that surrounds the name worldwide makes Ferrari’s place in Fiat’s portfolio akin, in the words of one insider, to a glass of champagne on a table full of cola bottles.
But, according to Brunner, it will not be long before the champagne is more than metaphorical. “McLaren are still better than Ferrari,” he says, “because Ferrari’s aerodynamics have until now been done in a wind tunnel more suitable for Matchbox cars. But with the new one, I am sure it will change. Ferrari are keen, they have the money, the team are working well and the engine is the best in Formula One. They probably won’t win this season, but give them a year and they will get there.”