In the first of three features, ESPN looks at how Ferrari turned its fortunes around this season, starting with the change in personnel and management since 2014.
On paper Ferrari's 2015 season was not spectacular. Three wins, second place in the constructors' championship and several thrashings at the hands of Mercedes is hardly the stuff of Maranello folklore. But statistics don't tell the whole story. Changes at Ferrari since the start of 2014 have been deep and decisive, and crucially those changes have put the team in a position to win races again.
It's easy to forget just how disastrous 2014 was for Ferrari. In a year when a major regulation change pushed engine technology back to the forefront of the sport, Maranello's motoristi got it very wrong. Ferrari's first ever hybrid V6 turbo was hamstrung by packaging demands from the team's aerodynamicists and was estimated to be 50bhp down on the class-leading Mercedes power unit. When the lap time advantage promised in the wind tunnel failed to materialise on track, Ferrari spent most of the season scrapping over minor points rather than podium positions. Kimi Raikkonen, Ferrari's last world champion, returned to the team ahead of 2014 and was the first to test the car on track. He was somewhat underwhelmed.
"Every year you go out for the first few laps and you get on the power and test the turn-in and you know if it feels right or not," he told ESPN. "After one lap and a few corners you can tell if it's going to be good or, erm, not so good.
"You have numbers and this and that, and no team will come and tell you 'By the way we built a bad car', but sometimes it doesn't work out as they hoped and as the numbers say. We knew that it would not be as good as we hoped at that first test and obviously with the new engines and everything it was also more complicated to correct everything in the right amount of time."
Key to turning the situation around was another returning Ferrari employee, new technical director James Allison. He had worked for the team during the height of its success in the early 2000s with Michael Schumacher, but the car he found upon his return was a far cry from the championship-winning Ferraris of the previous decade.
"It was very clear that even if you made ridiculously optimistic assumptions about what the opposition were doing on those opening days, we were still well behind," he explained. "So from the opening day of winter testing it was clear that we had a lot of work to do. It took us a little bit longer to work out roughly what we should do."
Above Allison in the command chain, Ferrari did not hold back in making changes. The team went through a period of blood-letting, relieving several members of senior management from their positions. No one was sacred and over the year Ferrari parted company with its head of engine design, head of engineering, head of aerodynamics, head of tyres, two team principals (within an eight-month period) and its president of 23 years, Luca di Montezemolo. From the outside it looked like Ferrari was in crisis, but behind the scenes Allison was given the authority to make crucial changes for 2015.
"It was urgent," Allison explained. "It was a very a complicated period because we were busy trying to race a car that was itself struggling and get as much performance into that as we could, but knew that a normal approach of carrying on doing what we were doing was not going to hit it.
"I guess things really took off and really gathered momentum from around May or June of 2014, which was when there were some personnel changes on the Ferrari side."
Allison focused the technical side on rectifying relatively obvious issues with the power unit while breaking new ground with the car's cooling and aerodynamics. With most of the technical changes well underway, the charismatic Maurizio Arrivabene was brought in as team principal to rally the troops at the end of the year. After a season of intense work and nothing but a distant fourth-place finish in the constructors' championship to show for it, Arrivabene's arrival was a breath of fresh air. Raikkonen, who experienced both managements old and new, says it created the basis for the team's success this year.
"All teams are different, they all have a different way of doing things and different characters, but I think this year is the best it has been at Ferrari. It was very good in the beginning when I was last here [between 2007 and 2009], but if I compare it to last year the team is more together, more open and more clear.
"We work as one team with one goal and it's not like one person only wants to be in front of the other. Of course you always want to beat your team-mate, but sometimes you have to look at the big picture and we want to get to the front and when we get there it will be the best driver that wins."
Ultimately the stopwatch does not lie. Over the course of 2014 the fastest Ferrari in qualifying was an average of 1.22 seconds off the fastest Mercedes. This year it has been an average of 0.67s off. In F1 terms it's still a significant chunk of time to be missing, but comparing 2014 to 2015 shows the progress Ferrari has made in a sport measured in thousandths of a second.
"There have been a lot of changes in the team, but changes for the right reason," says Raikkonen. "It's not that we've just changed this and that, it's been done smartly and we are starting to get the benefits from that."
The gap to Mercedes is still big but, under the flamboyant leadership of Arrivabene and working toward Allison's precise targets, the foundations to narrow it are now in place.
The story of Ferrari's season continues tomorrow with a look at how the team dramatically improved its engine performance this year.