2024 F1 champions? Ferrari's shot at first constructors' title in 16 years

Ferrari’s rich vein of form since Monza – interrupted only by its mis-step in Singapore qualifying – continued in Mexico last weekend. In this phase of the season it’s vying with the McLaren as F1’s fastest car and suddenly there’s a real prospect of the Scuderia taking an 11th hour world constructors’ championship – which would be its first since 2008. As Mexican GP winner Carlos Sainz said, “We can now allow ourselves to dream about the constructors’ title.”

Twenty-nine points behind McLaren and 25 clear of Red Bull with four races to go, Ferrari’s contention looks stronger than that of Red Bull which has only one car consistently even scoring points while both Ferrari drivers are taking victories. As have both McLaren drivers. So it’s going to be tight but the prospect of Ferrari’s first constructors’ crown in 16 years is very real.

The drivers’ crown looks destined to go elsewhere, with Sainz 122 points behind Max Verstappen, Charles Leclerc 71 points adrift.  The team’s position in the constructors’ table is partly through having two very strong drivers, with Sainz being way too good to be assigned the number two role. Last weekend was a case in point. If he’d not stepped up and had been assigned a back-up role to Leclerc, Ferrari would’ve been beaten by Lando Norris. It’s been Ferrari’s refusal to assign a lead and number two which is partly responsible for the strong position in the constructors’.

“James just came into the team and completely took it over”

Ferrari has several times in the past won the constructors’ championship while missing out on the drivers’ title, most notably in 1976. Despite Niki Lauda’s Nürburgring crash and him effectively missing three races as he recovered from his burns, Ferrari prevailed over McLaren in the constructors’ battle largely because it had a stronger number two in Clay Regazzoni than had McLaren in Jochen Mass that year. Jochen’s season was nowhere near as desultory as Sergio Perez’s has been for Red Bull in ’24, but he was a relatively rare podium visitor that season, apparently out-psyched by the incredible performances of the team’s new recruit James Hunt. “In ’75 it was just my second season with the team, I’d won a race and I was often competitive with my team-mate Emerson Fittipaldi, so I thought for ’76 I was ready to really go for it. But James just came into the team and completely took it over, not just by his speed – and the team will always follow the faster guy – but by his personality which was very extrovert and always carried with it a drama. I’m more introspective and I found that very hard to deal with.”

The next time Ferrari lost out in the drivers’ title but won the constructors’ was in the tragic 1982 season. With its switch to pull-rod front suspension for Zolder, the Ferrari 126C2 had just become unquestionably F1’s fastest car – and was far more reliable than the other two fast turbo cars from Renault and Brabham. Gilles Villeneuve was killed on that very weekend and his erstwhile team-mate (and Imola nemesis) Didier Pironi then looked a certainty for the title. He was leading the championship comfortably when he suffered his career-ending accident at Hockenheim. But the car was so good that Patrick Tambay and Mario Andretti (for two races) were absolute front-runners and the team points kept amassing. Even missing the last five races, Pironi finished runner-up to Williams’ Keke Rosberg, just 5 points adrift.

In the very next season, it happened again. The Scuderia’s René Arnoux went into a three-way title finale showdown but lost out to Brabham’s Nelson Piquet. Patrick Tambay only fell out of title contention in the penultimate race. After the blistering speed Arnoux had shown at Renault in ’82 – when he was generally quicker than Alain Prost, in stark contrast to the season before – the expectation at Ferrari was that he would assume the number one position. But team-mate Tambay was quicker throughout the first half of ’83 and it was only latterly that Arnoux really came on song. Rather like in ’24, there was no outright number one within the team and their points were spread, whereas Brabham was run by Gordon Murray very much with Nelson Piquet as its focus even with someone as good as Riccardo Patrese alongside him. As later Brabham driver Marc Surer commented, “Being in that team you felt like Nelson was the number one and you were the number three! Even just trying to get some time to talk with Gordon was incredibly difficult.”

Michael Schumacher was surely on course for the 1999 drivers’ championship until he broke his leg on the first lap of the British Grand Prix. Team-mate Eddie Irvine – very much Schumacher’s number two but who’d already scored a solid victory in the season-opener – stepped up and got a title momentum of his own going as Schumacher recovered but ultimately lost out to McLaren’s Mika Häkkinen. Essentially Ferrari won that constructors’ championship because it had a more reliable car than McLaren and Irvine delivered a stronger performance that year than his equivalent at McLaren, David Coulthard.

The most recent Ferrari constructors’ championship of 2008 coincided with Lewis Hamilton’s first, as he memorably took the title from the grasp of Ferrari’s Felipe Massa one corner from home in the final race. The constructors’ outcome wasn’t even particularly close, Ferrari winning it by 21 points over McLaren. The Scuderia’s line-up of Massa and Kimi Räikkönen gave it more of a double hit than McLaren’s Hamilton/Heikki Kovalainen line-up.

So, of the five times that Ferrari has won a constructors’ but lost the drivers’, three of them have been against a McLaren driver. Does this mean that Lando Norris is destined to follow in the footsteps of James Hunt, Mika Häkkinen and Lewis Hamilton?