Mauro talks about Alonso

You realize LdM is the one that brought Todt/Brawn/Bryne/Schumacher in, right? You can't knock him for not knowing how to build a team around Alonso without giving him credit for building the team around Schumacher. Same guy was in charge.

 

Haha I'm not going to tell people on this chat site again schumi was hired by GA on that's per Flavio Briatore E

 

To be fair it was on Luca's watch that they were "allowed" to leave.
The preference for an "Italian" team started the decline.

 

We have a winner vizsla knows what he speaks

 

Stop agreeing with me.
You know that it drives me mad.

 

It makes me mad that people don't give GA credit for saving ferrari . Ldm used ferrari to grow his ego after the brothers passed and his actions have cost the company and its workers tears and sweat and money while he pointed his finger at others and never one time claimed responsibility

 

Money?
If there was one thing that Luca excelled at it was making Ferrari money.

 

Ferrari was making more money sell hats and t shirts than sell cars.

 

That is the widely held belief. If so does it really matter? The cars sold the trinkets not the other way around.
I think that one important measure of Luca's tenure is the quality of the road cars. There's little doubt that they were/are better than what Ferrari was selling when he came to run things.
We do agree that his stewardship of the Scuderia was characterized by hubris.

 

He did fantastic things for the team and I respect him greatly but he operated in a very different era. Technologically, economically and politically.

 

I thought he said that Alonso wasn't developing the car...so suggesting that Alonso is a better driver than the 2nd team driver doesn't really matter, it's likely true, but having a car that doesn't compete just means that Alonso would end up continuing to beat the 2nd driver, but not the rest of the field, which is the only thing that matters. The difference between Michael and Alonso is that Michael could and did develop the car + was the faster team driver, that's the magic. Hell, Alonso might even have been faster than Michael, but Michael would have always won if they were paired because of development.
As for the comment about Michael at Mercedes, If you look at any quote from him or Ross when they started in 2010, they consistently said 5 years for the title, five years later they won. Truthfully, had Michael stayed in the car I bet he wins the title last year.
Now, with Ferrari, LdM got rid of Michael and Ross through a lot of political crap at the end of 2006, he didn't like how powerful they'd become and how much influence Michael specifically had, he figured they would continue to win without Michael and Ross. 2007 worked because the car and rules were virtually the same as '06, and Kimi was sufficiently fast (you can't knock Kimi for that title), but the downhill slide started there and it's still not done (unless this year is a rebound, but I'm not holding my breath).
Fastest way back to the front for Ferrari is simple, bring Ross back.

 

The man deserves more respect than that.


As does Alonso.

 

You have the right to feel that way.
I expect drivers to drive fast not to be moral exemplars.
F1 is a bit of a cesspool these days and no one involved smells like a rose.
Some have a more sensitive nose than others.

 

Admiring someone as a driver and admiring them as a person are two very different things for me. With the way the public persona of athletes is crafted and managed these days I'm not comfortable thinking that I really know what any of them are really like.
All I know for sure is what I see on the track.

 

Championships are won from the engineering up.
Start with a good design and you can tweak it up.
I cant remember the last championship that was won with a mediocre car.
I can remember a bucketfull won with a great design.
Blaming the driver is passing the buck.

 

Some would argue that, these days, championships are won in the rules committee or by exploiting the gaps in the regs. Double diffusers come to mind, wherein a dog one year can be untouchable the next. Or, because a team thought that a mass damper was a perfectly reasonable solution to handling issues. It's not so much that Brawn's or Renault's engineers were geniuses, but because the other engineers felt constrained. And, I would argue, no team is more self-constrained by the regs than Ferrari.

 

Oh, when you mentioned tires I thought you were going to refer to 2004 when Ferrari pressured the FIA to change the rules mid-season to favour their Bridgestone tires and disadvantage Michelin (fact), turning the season away from McLaren and Williams-BMW and allowing Ferrari to win the title after Michelin were forced by the FIA to re-design their tires halfway through the season.

Ferrari follows the rules more often? Aside from getting the tire rules changed to their advantage in 2004, anyone can easily recall the illegal hinged flexi-floor in 2007, where Kimi won Australia and the FIA disallowed the illegal device going forward but allowed the victory to stand; the barge-boards in 1999 where Irvine won a race with out-of-spec components but Brawn persuaded the FIA that they were within tolerance if you angled them just so (not how they were mounted); and on and on. Ferrari hasn't committed the gross violations like Briatore teams (Renault/Singapore or multiple Beneton cheats in 94), but Ferrari pushes the limits of the rules, pushes the grey areas, and pushes for rules advantages just as much as the other teams.

 

I don't want to be rude but this is frankly childish claiming Alonso's WDC are due to Ferrari's issues. Every year the rules change to a certain extent. The same plight can be used for Ferrari when Red Bull were dominating. Their toys were taken away with the changes towards the new engine when the team couldn't match the level of performance. And as a Ferrari man heart and out, I don't agree that we always followed the rules. During the domination era we were like Red Bull, pushing the limits but every team does that. There's no following the rules, simply pushing the limits as far as it can be pushed.

 

Micheal is the greatest race car driver of all time period end of story he would blow Fred away just look at the two in the wet . The real problem was after vettel won his first race in the rain at Monza that even if the ferrari was the same a redbull the young driver would beat all the other's on the grid .

 

The problem has never been teams pushing the rules and lobbying. The problem has always been officialdom (primarily the FiA) being pliable.

 

My feeling is that if "il Commendatore" was still alive he would have loved Fernando and would never have let him leave. Right or wrong that is.