Mark Hughes: Ferrari tells its F1 drivers to ‘shut up and drive’. It’s tragically repetitive

The honeymoon period between Ferrari executive chairman John Elkann and Lewis Hamilton seems to be over, given the former’s stinging summary of the team’s turgid performances after the São Paulo Grand Prix (DNF/DNF).

“If we look at the championship, we can say that the mechanics are winning it, with performance and everything done on the pitstops,” he began. “If we look at our engineers, there’s no doubt the car has improved. If we look at the rest, it’s not up to par. And we certainly have drivers who need to focus on driving and talk less, because we still have important races ahead and it’s not impossible to get second place.”

“Perhaps John should lead by example,” said Jenson Button in his pundit role, delivering a summary of the situation every bit as economical, elegant yet potent as the moves he used to make in the cockpit.

The public sentiments expressed by Elkann regarding his drivers are pretty much identical to those spoken by former principal Maurizio Arrivabene about Sebastian Vettel a few years ago or before that then-Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo’s about Fernando Alonso. You can even go back 34 years to the firing of Alain Prost for being critical of the team. The attitude can be encapsulated as: ‘shut up and drive’. Thereby showing the team’s inability to learn, caught in a cycle of stumbling over its own legend and lashing out, unable to accept its limitations. Great champions arrive but the team doesn’t believe it can learn from them, and that they should be somehow honoured just to be asked to join.

The only time Ferrari has not operated like that was when Ross Brawn, Jean Todt and Michael Schumacher between them formed a forcefield keeping upper management out. ‘Give us a budget and leave us alone. For as long as it takes.’ Unity within the team saw it for once deliver on its fantastic potential and it became the greatest the sport had ever seen up to that point. But it took a few years, even with the combined might of three very powerful individuals in rejecting the previous culture. Now it’s almost as if that time never happened.

It was Elkann who decided – from a place at least one step removed, possibly more, from a nitty-gritty understanding of the complex dynamics of F1 performance – that he needed to add Hamilton’s presence to the team. It was great for business and he was pushing on a half-open door in convincing Hamilton to come.
Hamilton found a team rather different to what he imagined and felt he could see quite clearly some of the reasons it had underperformed. Had he been able to make his observations from a position of strength they might have had a better chance of being acted upon. Maybe. But unfortunately the change in car traits – particularly in its heavy reliance on engine braking – has required a lot of muscle memory re-learning for a driver in the late stages of his career. So his observations about where the team needs to improve – based on his experiences of winning championships at Mercedes and McLaren – have not carried the internal heft they might have. In fact, it’s said that many in the team have reacted defensively against him, thereby factionalising it even further.
It’s all so tragically repetitive. The fact that it is illustrates that the problem lies with the team, not the drivers.

“Only unity can help us turn this situation around in the last races”

Neither Hamilton nor Charles Leclerc were taking the boss’s comments in the spirit of contrite employees Elkann might have wished for. “I back my team. I back myself. I will not give up. Not now, not then, not ever,” Hamilton responded on social media. Leclerc’s answer was withering. “It’s clear that only unity can help us turn this situation around in the last three races. We’ll give it all, as always.”

You don’t need to read too hard between the lines of either of those drivers. There are only a few words but none of them stand as anything other than a rebuttal of Elkann’s. Leclerc has particular reason to feel furious. In seven years of toil Ferrari has failed to provide him with a title calibre car. He habitually flatters his machinery – the car had absolutely no business being third quickest in Interlagos, for example, or on the front row and finishing second in the race in Mexico – and has shown patience beyond what the team deserves.

Leclerc is the only driver on the grid who in the past few seasons has delivered performances which in their consistent brilliance could stand comparison to Max Verstappen’s. Yet you can be sure that if Verstappen were at Maranello he would see the exact same limitations as the current drivers and all those before and that after a while he’d be told to shut up and drive.

Perhaps even more significant than damaging the relationship between Hamilton and Ferrari, what Elkann’s comments have quite possibly done is break the bond Leclerc felt with the team which backed his junior career and to which he has shown unflinching loyalty.

When Leclerc appears in a different team’s colours somewhere down the road you can bet the final straw in his decision to leave was the Elkann comments.

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