How Ferrari has turned it all around in 2012

Fernando Alonso leads the Formula 1 World Championship by 40 points. Think about that for a moment. A Ferrari that was all over the place during pre-season testing, and was a marginal Q3 contender in the early races of 2012, has taken its driver to a formidable position at the mid-season break. It's far from an insurmountable gap, but it's a remarkable turnaround from where it started.

Before we go any further, don't be fooled into thinking that the negativity at Ferrari pre-season was a construction of the media. The F2012 was an unwieldy car that lacked pace and balance. As technical supremo Pat Fry admits, had you told him five months ago what the situation would be now, he would have been staggered.

"I think everyone would have been," he laughs. "I'm surprised!" Nobody within Ferrari would have seriously considered backing themselves to be in this position, so it was no surprise heading into the season that the lameness of the Prancing Horse was the talk of the paddock. This makes what has happened since all the more impressive.

So how exactly has Ferrari pulled off this remarkable turnaround?

"There were a number of issues at the start of the year," explains Fry. "I don't want to go into all of them, but the most obvious one was the exhaust concept that we had which, although it gave some reasonable downforce, also gave us tyre-temperature issues. That's why we backed out of that in the end.

All the Flo-Vis in Italy couldn't help sure Ferrari's pre-season woes © XPB

"Some of the characteristics we ended up with were making the car difficult to drive, and because the exhaust system wasn't working exactly as we wanted we were lacking downforce as well. So we made the conscious decision to change the exhaust concept and then try and regroup. That was the right decision, because then we managed to sort out all of the characteristic issues and the basic CL [lift coefficient] issues we had. Then we introduced the exhaust in Canada [in June].

"From the work we did in February, we could introduce the Canada system almost without a hiccup. I'm sure I must be the person who knows the most about tyre temperatures and exhausts in the pitlane after all the work we've done on it!

"But the exhaust effect is a small effect. It gives you downforce; most people are exploiting it - I think we made a reasonable step at the Spanish Grand Prix [in May]. It didn't include the exhaust as part of that package. It's just a small step in the right direction, really; it's not the thing that transformed the car."

The new exhaust was along similar lines to the McLaren and Sauber designs, with the airflow from the exhaust directed to 'seal' the diffuser (see below). It certainly worked, mitigating the tyre-overheating problem, reducing the negative effect on the Coke-bottle area caused by the original design and making better use of the fast exhaust gasflow. Alonso was within four tenths of pole in Canada, which was nothing extraordinary. But when he followed up his Montreal fifth place with two wins and a second, it became clear that the upgrade had make a difference. That's not to suggest that Ferrari's problems were limited to the exhaust set-up - the struggles of the car were as much a legacy of the outmoded Ferrari way of doing things as anything else, and the modified exhaust was just part of the solution.

Pat Fry says improvement is down to a combination of aero and exhaust © LAT

"There were a few other aerodynamic characteristics that we weren't happy with, so it was a case of realising that and changing the way we worked to make sure we include all the parameters we should be including," says Fry of the situation at the start of the year. "It was a conscious decision to say, 'Right, we'll now completely change the work to actually try and improve it.' It certainly seems to be working."

So it's clear that this was about more than merely a car that wasn't quite right; it was about addressing ongoing limitations within Ferrari. Fry was promoted to his current role - officially, if cumbersomely, titled 'technical director for the chassis division' - in the wake of Aldo Costa's departure last year, and set about changing the way Ferrari operated. This meant moving away from a methodology born in the era of unlimited testing and ensuring that the finished racer is produced through windtunnel, CFD and simulation work. He doesn't say as much, but reading between the lines he met a little resistance to some of this change, and the early struggles with the 2012 car gave him a mandate to push through the full scope of reform.

"The problems we had with the car leaves you with nothing to hide behind, does it?" says Fry. "Then it's just a case of doing the work to try and bring [improvements] in quicker or earlier then we were hoping. The direction is correct, it's just a huge amount of work until the end of the year to keep up with everyone else."

Despite such improvements, last time out in Hungary the Ferrari was not a match for the McLaren, Lotus or Red Bull. That is particularly worrying for Alonso's hopes of holding his position. Remarkably, his fifth place at the Hungaroring, frankly the maximum the car was capable of given that at no stage did it show anything like the pace needed to go any higher, extended his lead by a further six points.

By Monaco, both Alonso and Massa were looking strong © LAT

This is symptomatic of a campaign in which consistency, combined with ramming home any advantage when you get it, has been key. This is exactly what Alonso has done, never finishing lower than ninth and taking a car that shouldn't be leading the standings to the top.

"He's very good, isn't he?" says Fry of Alonso. "Take the German Grand Prix; in that wet qualifying session he was half a second quicker than everyone. In the race, he controlled it from the front. We didn't have the quickest car, but we had better tyre degradation, so in the end people closed in at the start of the stint and in the end they were dropping away. It's all about how you set your car up.

"Fernando was driving sensibly and he was the one who came over the radio saying, 'Let's wind the engine down and save fuel until the end of the race, when it might be needed'. So even though there were cars one and a half seconds behind, we were backing the engine down to use it later in the race.

"He's certainly thinking tactically and obviously knows how much margin he's got in the way he's driving. He drove a great race in Germany."

But Alonso cannot do it alone. What Ferrari can rely on is that, if it keeps the car in the ballpark of the competition, he will keep racking up the points. The Hungaroring didn't seem to suit the Ferrari relative to the McLaren and Alonso was 0.9s down in qualifying. While it's hard to imagine the deficit will be the same when the championship gets back underway at Spa in September, Alonso has left the team in no doubt about how much there is still to do.

"We finished Canada and said we needed to improve, we finished Valencia and said we needed to improve, at Silverstone we had to improve and now we have to improve again," says Alonso. "Because we won a couple of races, it seemed that everything was on the right path, but we have never said anything else. With dry running on Friday, Saturday and Sunday [in Hungary] you can see more clearly. Lotus, McLaren and Red Bull have been ahead of us for the whole championship. It's just that at the start of the year it was 1.5 seconds, then eight tenths, then four, then six. That's the great merit of the team, that with all this we are 40 points ahead, which is completely abnormal."

A few more of these would be very welcome in Maranello © LAT

And if that doesn't make clear how much work Ferrari still needs to do to close out this championship, nothing will. From where it started, the Scuderia has done an outstanding job. It has stayed in the game, and is even ahead of it on points heading into the final nine races of the 2012 season.

The foundations have been laid and much of the bad start has been made up for. Now, as the other big teams start to gain momentum, the real challenge begins.