What really lost Ferrari and Vettel the WDC this year?

I want to select more than 3 choices.

 

I put a) Strategists’ bad calls, and b) Vettel’s mistakes, caused by c) Arrivabene’s incompetence as a team manager.

It's obvious that Ferrari lost the championship this year more than Mercedes won it.

Ferrari had a head start with 2 wins, and led up to mid season; then it just melted and gave back the advantage to Mercedes.

Not the first time in Ferrari history ....

 

Vettel, everything else was just noise.

Germany can be defined as the single event which led to losing the WDC. After that he started compounding that mistake by trying to get it all back at once.

 

"There were mistakes from Vettel and to a lesser extent from the team" Arrivabene states here - https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/139870/ferrari-must-lose-fear-of-winning--arrivabene

Now if he would leave and shut up that would be a nice thing!

 

Bad strategy calls and missing technical updates (compared to Mercedes and partly because of the FIA ) led to Vettel making mistakes by overcompensating....

 

1) Vettel mistakes
2) Marlboro Man
3) Sergio’s passing
4) SF in disarray
5) FIA no longer being Ferrari International Assistance (quite the opposite, really)

Not necessarily in this order

 

Bad strat
Vettel Errors

They had it and lost it. Kudos to Lewis and Merc.

 

You forget to add wingman Bottas and his wide Mercedes strategy to your list

 

Multiple reasons really. Here are mine.

1) Seb mistakes
2) Pit wall strat calls

and

3) chunking 4 months of updates out the window (downgrades really) in the 2nd season only to revert back to where we started.

Kudos to the reliabilty side AND the woman from FIAT who oversaw quality control. She gets my vote. We HAD the car, just could'nt make the "other side" of it work.

 

@Igor Ound

Good post by the way and the array of multiple choices.

 

I'll just give two. Might not be enough to have put SF and Vettel in points lead, but I think both the WDC and WCC would still be well within reach.

Hockenheim (Vettel error)

Monza (really think team orders at start should have prevented that tragedy).

 

Maybe they should have not told Kimi to pack it in until after the Monza race.

 

Valid.

Or not at all....? (different discussion I know)

 

All of these things. Stupid thread.

 

Maybe they'll learn from this year and luck will also change for 2019

 

1) Seb
2)Vettel
3) Sebastian Vettel.

So I read the article where he said Ferrari didn't have a dominant car. Gave me the impression that he thinks that to win the WDC he has to be in a dominant car, which implies even he doesn't think he is good enough to beat Lewis, all other things equal.

 

The technical side at the Scuderia did its job and delivered a car that was often Superior to the Mercedes.
So Binotto is OK.

The operational side went into a meltdown half way through the season and never recovered.
They couldn't execute sensible strategies, nor manage Vettel's crisis.
That was Arrivabene's responsability.

 

German GP..."darkest moment in Seb's carreer" as Nico put it.
Points reversed to Lewis favour and I think so did all the momentum..

 

Many things, everything matters.

But Vettel alone threw the biggest amount of points.

The development of the car suffered a slump at the worst moment of the season, when they had to recover the points that Vettel had thrown.

And it's fair admitting that Hamilton and Mercedes made the best of the situation.

 

Sebastian 'oops i did it again' Vettel should take a good look in the mirror , he is still in denial that he completely screwed up.

 

See the post above linking the Autosport article. Arriva says it was more Vettel than team lol

 

Only needed two votes:

Vettel's mistakes and Hamilton's brilliance.