Scuderia Ferrari put an end to a chunk of the driver market speculation in Silverstone on Friday morning when the prancing horse confirmed that Kimi Raikkonen would be staying on at Maranello for the 2017 F1 season.
Given that Ferrari traditionally leave their driver announcements until their home race of Monza, in September, the British GP news was received with surprise and curiosity. During the post-session team personnel press conference on Friday afternoon, Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivabene explained the psychology behind confirming Kimi two months earlier than anyone anticipated.
"Our main interest, our issue, was not related to the driver," Arrivabene said. "We were very proud and very happy about the work of Kimi since the beginning of the season. He was asked to show his commitment, his results so he deserved the confirmation for next year. Then I was talking about the fact that we needed a kind of good atmosphere in the team and the drivers could help to keep this atmosphere.
"Due to the fact that the team is still quite new and we need to keep the same commitment for everybody without inserting into the team elements that they can disturb or something new that could break this balance. Having said so, I also said that we confirm Kimi not very soon, because we are in July.
"Normally the tradition of Ferrari was to do a press release in Monza. We are a new team, we have changed the tradition and we are confirming now because I think we would like to be, as I said, focused and concentrated on car development and not about confirmation or non-confirmation of the drivers. So it's a message of stability."
The message of stability was designed not only to reassure tifosi and Ferrari management alike, but also to provide Raikkonen with the sort of stability that would allow the Finn to focus on his performance behind the wheel, and not his performance in press conferences and media sessions, which have echoed with variations on contract extension questions since before the first 2016 car was unveiled in Barcelona in February.
"Relating to the pressure, you know better than me that in the last three or four races every time that Kimi was sitting in a press conference somebody would ask what about his contract, what about your contract?," Arrivabene explained. "I asked many many times for a bit of respect for a driver that was a world champion with Ferrari.
"I know that his nickname is Iceman but he's a human being. Sometimes in Formula One we need to be conscious that we are talking, not with cars because actually the computer talks with the car but the cars are driven by human beings so even Iceman is a human being with his emotions and I think he could feel the pressure. That's it."
One point of interest to arise from Arrivabene's comments was that Ferrari not only sees itself as a "quite new" team following the chaotic period of management changes seen in 2014, but that this new Ferrari is one concerned with protecting its workforce, reducing pressure where possible to improve performance. This represents a dramatic turnaround from the days during which errors could not be tolerated, with numerous staffers hired and fired for making simple (yet costly, in championship terms) mistakes.
One lesson learned from Ferrari's first post-Schumacher decade has been that a culture of fear of failure quickly becomes a culture of quagmire, with staffers so afraid of messing up that they cease to try anything different, anything left-field, anything on that border between madness and genius that is often the source of the greatest gains.
Kimi Raikkonen is currently the most high-profile beneficiary of the new corporate attitude in Maranello, but the trickle-down effect is already being felt elsewhere in the race team. Sooner or later, it will make itself shown on track.