F1 Preview: Italian GP – Ferrari’s World Cup Final

Ferrari have underperformed in 2019 and it took 13 races for the Italian team to win a Grand Prix. Without doubt, they will be disappointed after so much hope and promise but early on it became clear that they would be unable to challenge for either world championship.

But Monza and the Italian Grand Prix means nearly everything to Ferrari. It’s their Olympic final or their final hole to use a golfing term. A win here would not necessarily undo their poor season but it would feel like a partial redemption and the team will take a lot of confidence for the rest of the year.

Incredibly, Ferrari have not won at Monza since 2010 with Fernando Alonso. Last year, they had a great chance to win but a stonking drive from Lewis Hamilton prevented it from happening. Kimi Raikkonen managed to take pole position from Sebastian Vettel so they put themselves in a great position after qualifying.

But, a Vettel spin at the second chicane after minor contact with Hamilton hurt Ferrari’s strategy and left them vulnerable. Nevertheless, Hamilton maintained the pressure lap after lap including a great wheel to wheel battle with Raikkonen following a safety car to take the lead with less than 10 laps to go.

Nine years on from Ferrari’s last Italian win, another fantastic chance looms this weekend.

It’s as if the SF90 has been built just for Monza with it’s amazing power unit coupled with a low drag philosophy. Spa-Francorchamps proved how good the Ferrari is in a straight line.

The Belgian track is the easiest track to overtake on, yet it took Hamilton 4-5 laps to overtake Vettel even when he had a big slipstream and DRS. Normally, you can just sail by but Hamilton had to set up the overtake a lot by staying close in the final corners and getting a really good exit out of La Source to be right on Vettel’s tail going into Eau Rouge.

Scarily, that was with a brand new, upgraded Mercedes power unit versus an old Ferrari power unit. Mercedes may have played things safe and not ran the engine so hard, following major engine problems for Sergio Perez and Robert Kubica but the straight line speed deficit was still large.

Ferrari should be bringing their spec three power unit to Monza and rumours suggests that the upgrade is a massive one which will only extend their advantage on the straights. Where Ferrari are finding so much time in the power unit is a mystery but behind the scenes, the engine department is clearly doing a mighty job and it’s only the aerodynamics and chassis that is letting the team down.

Qualifying should be a relatively easy 1-2 for Ferrari, should both drivers put in solid laps. They won’t even have to do anything spectacular I suspect.

But just like last Sunday, they will likely come under severe pressure from the Mercedes. The Silver Arrows were a lot stronger in the middle sector at Spa and there are similar high and medium speed turns at Monza too.

The Lesmo corners, the Ascari chicane and Parabolica all will allow Mercedes to carry more speed off the corner to perhaps stay close enough to the Ferrari cars, get into the slipstream and make an overtake.

Mercedes should also be strong at the Rettifilo chicane where traction is paramount and also the second chicane. The big question is, will it be enough to overcome the straight line speed of the Ferrari?

In the dirty air, the Mercedes will inevitably hurt its tyres more but the Ferrari hurts its tyres a lot anyway. We saw this on Sunday at Spa when Vettel had to pit twice and Leclerc barely hung on, whereas Hamilton still had very good speed even after running in the dirty air of Vettel for a while.

With softer tyre compounds at Monza this year (the C2, C3 and C4) this will play into Mercedes hands too.

Whatever happens, it will be fascinating but for Mercedes to win they will have to make at least one overtake on the track whereas Ferrari will need to somehow control the pace of the race and play the team game.

It doesn’t end there. As of writing, rain is forecast for race day at Monza. Whilst there have been no wet qualifying sessions to see the ultimate wet weather pace of the cars, there has been a wet race in Germany (the first for nearly two years).

And this year’s German GP saw a continuation of Mercedes dominating in the wet. Hamilton is almost unstoppable when it rains and the Mercedes car can almost walk on water, the two of them together is a fierce, tough combination to beat.

Yes, Mercedes had a disaster that day but if you look at their race pace early in the race when the track was genuinely wet, Hamilton built up a 10 second lead with Leclerc unable to stay with the top three and Vettel didn’t make rapid progress from the back of the field.

If it rains, Mercedes will become heavy favourites for the win. That said, there are so many variables in a wet race, as we saw at Hockenheim, so nothing is a foregone conclusion but Ferrari are less likely to win in a wet race than they are in the dry.

Another driver who would be in contention in the wet is Max Verstappen. But the Dutchman will be starting at the back of the grid at Monza due to excessive engine usage. Pierre Gasly is going to start at the back too in the Toro Rosso for the same reason.

Honda introduced their spec four engine last weekend in Belgium although Alexander Albon used an older specification for the Grand Prix. Nevertheless, Honda said they were encouraged by the new spec engine.

If there is rain, Verstappen might be able to produce a similar performance to the drive he executed in Brazil 2016.

It might be worth the risk of running a wet setup for Verstappen and Gasly (even though there is not much difference between a dry and wet setup nowadays) but it should be exciting to see Verstappen carve his way through the field in any weather conditions.

Elsewhere, the midfield should be very close again with Racing Point showing good form at Spa. They tend to go well in the second half of the season and Sergio Perez has scored points in Italy every time he has raced a Force India/Racing Point car.

His sixth place in Belgium last time out was very important, having not scored any points in the previous eight races.

Italy could be a big weekend for Renault who have continued to have power unit issues as well as a lack of performance. If there are no signs of improvement from Renault in the next six months, I can see them leaving the sport at the end of next year.

They simply have to invest more into the team and more specifically the engine department if either the manufacturer team or McLaren are going to challenge Mercedes, Ferrari or Red Bull. Other teams have had reliability problems but they are rare, with Renault it seems to be a consistent and almost an inevitability that a reliability problem occurs.

A wet race, just like this year’s race in Hockenheim, will offer a brilliant opportunity for the midfield teams to collect double figure points or even get onto the podium as they battle to get as high as they can in the constructors’ championship with substantial differences in prize money between each place in the teams’ standings.

Expect the passionate Tifosi to be surrounding Monza in there thousands. A Ferrari win is everything they want and its hard to put into words how much a Ferrari win in Italy would mean to everyone in Italy.

Monza has secured a deal to host a Grand Prix until 2024 but Ferrari would dearly want a win in 2019 rather than having to wait for another chance 12 months on.

The last time there was a wet race at Monza, an Italian team won. That’s right Toro Rosso in 2008 with Vettel. Eleven years on, what kind of magic will Monza deliver and will a Ferrari driver finally stand on the top step of the podium in front of the sea of red below the famous podium.