MOTORSPORT: Heat's on at Ferrari

It’s more than 10 years since Ferrari won a Formula 1 world title and the pressure is mounting at Maranello.

Ferrari chief executive Lous Camilleri says new team principal Mattia Binotto has his full support, but the two Mercedes W10s have finished first and second in the five grands prix so far this year after trailing the red team through most of pre-season testing.

“There is no panic. He [Binotto] will find a solution. I am sure we can recover quickly,” Camilleri said this week.

When football club presidents say such things it usually spells the death knell for a coach.

Ferrari parent Fiat Chrysler may not have the patience Camilleri is displaying.

The Italian media, to which Ferrari is so sensitive, is turning up the heat.

Influential sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport’s Umberto Zapelloni has called it “a real crisis”. Another paper, Corriere dello Sport, editorialised: “For an ever-worsening Ferrari, there are just no excuses anymore.”

Ferrari’s SF90 is the fastest of this year’s F1 cars in a straight line, but the Mercs more than make up for that in the corners – especially slower corners – and in Barcelona last weekend Max Verstappen’s Honda-powered Red Bull RB15 finished ahead of both the Maranello machines of Sebastien Vettel and Charles Leclerc.

Next up, on May 29, they race on the streets of Monaco, a circuit with lots of slow corners and the shortest of straights.

There are grave doubts that Ferrari can make much impact on the dominance of the Silver Arrows now this season.

All the signs are that Mercedes has interpreted the 2019 rules on aerodynamics, the increased fuel limit (110kg) and Pirelli’s latest tyre compounds much, much better than Ferrari – and, to a lesser extent, than Red Bull.

Ferrari and Red Bull can tweak what they have created, but fundamentally ‘the game’ is already over with 16 races remaining.

Even in Mercedes’ home market, Germany, telecaster RTL is bleating that it had one million fewer viewers last Sunday than it should have because the sport has become even more one-sided.

Ferrari doesn’t even know the root of its problems with the SF90, let alone how to fix them.

Binotto has improved the Scuderia’s rapport with the F1 media generally, after the years of the gruff and dismissive Mauricio Arrivabene that ended over the off-season, but that’s not what makes race-winning F1 cars.

Unlike Arrivabene, whose background had been in sponsorship with Marlboto, Binotto was elevated from the post of technical director. He claims Ferrari will fix its weaknesses quickly once it understands them, but the horse – or the Silver Arrows, rather than the Prancing Horse – has bolted.

While Maranello’s woes are absorbing the F1 world, Daniel Ricciardo’s new team Renault is coming under closer scrutiny after the carsales.com.au global ambassador and teammate Nico Hulkenberg finished only 12th and 13th in Spain.

It was the third race this season in which neither of the yellow cars scored championship points.

Renault’s board is reported to be asking why the team is not narrowing the gap to Mercedes and, more pertinently, why McLaren with Renault power is doing so much better than the factory team.

The French media has turned the spotlight on the drivers, but Renault team principal Cyril Abiteboul – like Binotto, a man under increasing pressure – has declared that “the drivers are our least problem”.

Next year’s F1 calendar is starting to take shape, with a GP to be revived at Zandvoort in the Netherlands on the back of Verstappen’s massive following there as well the new race in Vietnam.

It’s qualifying this weekend for America’s ‘Greatest Spectacle in Racing’, the Indianapolis 500, with 36 cars vying for the 33 places on the grid of the race to be run hours after the Monaco GP.

Australia’s reigning winner, Will Power, topped the timesheet at The Brickyard for Team Penske on one of the practice days this week but the next day was midfield in a shortened session and behind fellow Australian James Davison, who is driving a Dale Coyne entry.

Fernando Alonso, the dual F1 world champion making his second attempt to win the American classic, crashed his McLaren-entered Dallara heavily the day Power was fastest.

A back-up car with a new Chevrolet engine has been readied for the Spaniard, who was not injured and says he has “no fear” after hitting both the inside and outside concrete walls.

Formula 4, the junior open-wheeler category with wings and slick tyres unlike Formula Ford, has all got a bit much for the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport in its fifth season and it has handed over the running of it to the MSR group.

MSR stands for Motorsport Safety and Rescue, although its operations have expanded way beyond its medical, fire and rescue services to rallying when Tasmanian Geoff Becker founded it 22 years ago.

Its involvement in F4 will be managed by former Nissan Australia chief executive Richard Emery.

CAMS, which imported 20 cars to start F4 in Oz although race fields have only ever comprised barely half that number, said it would continue “to facilitate the technical, sponsorship, spare parts, sporting resources and media support” for the category.

It claimed F4 “has proven itself as a development category” and that the ‘partnership’ with MSR was “a logical step” to take it “to another level”.

Emery said MSR saw it as “an opportunity to breathe new life into the category”.

F4 is on the program for this weekend’s Shannons Nationals round at Sydney Motorsport Park that marks the debut of the new TCR Australia 2.0-litre touring car series.

“We’ll be working with people already in our networks to find new drivers who will commit to the (F4) championship and our team will also work closely with karting organisations around the country to find the next generation of drivers,” Emery said.