How Ferrari fell apart at its home race

The loyal Tifosi whooped and cheered Sebastian Vettel on the Formula 1 podium at Monza, and booed dominant race winner Lewis Hamilton. They love Ferrari no matter what - even a Ferrari that got utterly pulverised by Mercedes at Ferrari's home race, while celebrating its 70th anniversary as a racing car constructor.

Mercedes finishing one-two, with Vettel a distant third, was a terrible result for Ferrari - at Monza of all places; its own turf!

Vettel finished more than 36 seconds behind chief F1 title rival Hamilton and consequently conceded the championship lead to Hamilton for the first time this season.

There is no doubt that Monza's long straights, its relative lack of corners, low-downforce demands, and reliance on engine power, played more naturally to Mercedes' strengths than Ferrari's, but even Mercedes was surprised to see Ferrari struggle so badly in the Italian Grand Prix.

"It looks like this weekend Ferrari has made a step back somehow," said Mercedes motorsport chief Toto Wolff. "I think we were very solid, but also they haven't performed in the way everyone expected.

"Our analysis, based on the Friday long runs, was we thought they would be close considering their Spa performance. I cannot tell you what the gap was, but certainly 30-plus seconds is something that is an outlier.

"Red Bull, starting from the back of the grid, almost finished P3. There's just something that's out of synch here, something that's not how it should be."

Vettel encouragingly lapped within two tenths of Mercedes over a single lap on Friday, but Ferrari showed poor long-run pace as the drivers struggled with the balance of the car on low-downforce settings, which Ferrari put down to a particular characteristic of its car's design.

"If we take pure layout, it's probably one of the circuits that's not going to be so easy for us, unfortunately our home grand prix," Vettel's team-mate Kimi Raikkonen said.

"I think it's something we have to fix in this kind of circuit with the low downforce. I don't know what I'm supposed to say, we just didn't have the speed."

All indicators pre-weekend suggested this would be a Mercedes track anyway - even more so once it became clear Ferrari would not introduce an engine upgrade but instead stick with the unit introduced four races ago at Silverstone.

Ferrari carried a 5mph deficit to Mercedes along the Kemmel Straight at Spa, but that track requires a compromise on downforce settings for the twisty second sector that isn't necessary at Monza, and Monza also contains fewer corners in which Ferrari can exploit whatever downforce advantage it might hold over the W08.

Neither Raikkonen nor Vettel were happy with the way their Ferraris were handling over the long runs on Friday, and the result was a deficit of more than eight tenths of a second per lap on average to Mercedes.

It should have been possible to close that gap with some set-up adjustments and extra running in final practice on Saturday morning, but atrocious weather put paid to that plan. Ferrari also ran into serious tyre trouble in the last part of a wet qualifying session. Both drivers were beaten by a Williams, a Force India and the Red Bulls, as Hamilton blitzed the field for pole.

Ferrari was unable to get the wet tyres into their correct temperature working range, and interestingly Raikkonen said the wet weather of Saturday exacerbated a fundamental handling characteristic of the car at Monza.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to say, we just didn't have the speed" Kimi Raikkonen

In other words, the handling problems Ferrari experienced in qualifying carried over to the race as well, it's just that the extra grip available in the dry on Sunday closed the overall gap.

Whatever the specific reasons for its struggles, Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne was not impressed by his team's performance.

"I think we just screwed up," Marchionne told German broadcaster RTL. "The set-up for the car was wrong. I think we underestimated the circuit. We screwed up from Spa into here.

"Now we need to go back to the factory and find out which way the car went sideways."

Grid penalties for Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo at least limited the damage to Ferrari before the start of the race, allowing Raikkonen and Vettel to begin the race from the third row of the grid instead of the fourth.

Raikkonen briefly got up to fourth by passing the second Mercedes of Valtteri Bottas into the Roggia chicane on the opening lap, but before the end of that lap it was Bottas back in front, the Mercedes coming around the outside of Raikkonen's Ferrari through Parabolica and squeezing it to the inside of the pit straight for good measure.

Raikkonen was struggling for grip, later complaining to Ferrari that he didn't "know how to fix the rear end" of the car. While Bottas made short work of passing Lance Stroll's Williams and Esteban Ocon's Force India to climb to second, Raikkonen put up little resistance as Vettel slipped past at the first Lesmo into fifth place.

By the end of lap eight, Vettel had blown by the Force India and Williams as well, and was up to third, 9.134s behind Hamilton. Over the remaining 45 laps, Vettel lost another 27.183s, which equates to a deficit of 0.604s per lap.

"We tried to keep as close as possible but we simply didn't have the pace," said Vettel. "I'm sure there are plenty of reasons, but I don't want to get too technical.

"The last 20 laps I was struggling - I went off in Turn 1 and I think something broke in the car. The left-hand side of the steering was a bit down and I couldn't trust the car, especially on braking and it's a braking track, so the last laps I don't think showed the pace we could have gone."

Ferrari said Vettel's power steering briefly dropped out as he approached the Rettifilo chicane at the start of lap 40. He lost almost 3.5s to Hamilton on that lap alone, but Vettel's pace thereafter didn't drop off significantly, despite his apparent lack of confidence.

"We probably lacked something like half a second per lap, but there's not all the parts of the race you can judge," Vettel added.

"I'm not worried too much about the gap. Monza is a specific place. If you have that extra bit and confidence, it makes a big difference.

"We probably knew it would be a difficult race; probably expected as well that we would be closer [to Mercedes]. All in all, it's not nice to see those two [Mercedes drivers] winning, but at least we gave everything we had and that's most important. We gave everything for the people out there."

"Our car was very strong through every kind of corner, and that was encouraging" Toto Wolff

If losing to both Mercedes drivers on home turf wasn't bad enough, at one stage it looked as though Vettel's podium spot might come under serious threat from Ricciardo's charging Red Bull.

Starting down on the eighth row of the grid, Ricciardo defied expectations Red Bull would struggle for speed on this track by perfectly executing an alternative tyre strategy and climbing into the top five.

He made short work of the lower order, climbing to ninth by the end of lap seven by picking off Pascal Wehrlein, Marcus Ericsson, Carlos Sainz Jr, Nico Hulkenberg, Daniil Kvyat and Kevin Magnussen, and he gained an extra place thanks to team-mate Verstappen's lap-three clash with Felipe Massa's Williams at Rettifilo.

Ricciardo jumped Sergio Perez's Force India at the Roggia chicane on lap 17, then leapt to fourth when Stroll, Ocon and Massa pitted out of his way.

Ricciardo went as far as the end of lap 37 of 53 before finally ditching his worn soft tyres for new super-softs, but had lapped quickly enough to clear the Ocon, Stroll, Massa train when he emerged.

His Red Bull fitted with much fresher and softer tyres, Ricciardo set off after the Ferraris, making mincemeat of Raikkonen with a late lunge on the brakes at the Rettifilo chicane at the start of lap 41 - a move reminiscent of Ricciardo's mugging of Bottas for fifth at the same spot in the closing stages of last year's race.

That set up a thrilling chase of Vettel over the final 13 laps. Ricciardo took 0.889s per lap out of Vettel for nine of those laps, before the Ferrari driver found a way to stem the tide. Vettel's last four laps were near-enough a match for Ricciardo's, so the Red Bull fell four seconds short of stealing the final podium spot away.

Vettel put a brave face on his defeat, despite getting trounced by Mercedes and almost beaten by a Red Bull too. Sure, Monza is an outlier in the general spread of circuits, and it seems almost certain Ferrari will be much stronger next time out, on the low-speed streets of Singapore, but it surely must hurt Vettel to have finally lost his long-held points lead in the title chase, at Ferrari's home race of all places, and after such a strong performance in the previous race at Spa.

"The support has been amazing and, despite the numbers, the gap, you can name the negatives, I'm very, very positive," Vettel said.

"I know that people are going into the office tomorrow more committed than before. The spirit is there; we just need to keep it up."

But 'spirit' alone won't be enough to get the job done. Monza highlights how much better the Mercedes engine still is compared to the Ferrari - "a Mercedes whitewash" Red Bull team principal Christian Horner called it - and how much stronger Mercedes looks when downforce needs to be seriously trimmed from the cars, given it can run a bit more wing than its rivals and not worry so much about the drag.

The potential worry for Ferrari is that Mercedes also feels it took a step forward with the set-up of its car at Monza, after a surprisingly narrow victory over Ferrari at Spa last time out.

"Straight from the get-go we had a car that was really solid - good to drive," explained Wolff. "With the new [2017] car we are still finding out [how to] simulate in the best possible way what you think you are going to experience on the track.

"We had some very strong sectors in Spa, [but] we sacrificed raw speed for race speed, and therefore we lacked low-downforce performance, braking stability, apex stability and traction. We tried to understand and optimise that for Monza.

"You can see we didn't have any of those issues in the slow-speed at Monza. Our car was very strong through the corners, every kind of corner, and that was encouraging."

Bottas, who completed the fourth lap of the race 3.397s behind Hamilton and finished the 53rd and final tour just 1.074s further back, revelled in what he called "a different kind of stability this weekend that we have not had before", while Hamilton said work behind the scenes after Spa should put Mercedes in better shape for the next race too.

"In Spa there were sections that Ferrari were killing us, and other sections that we were quicker," said Hamilton, who feels his home victory at Silverstone back in July "sparked a forest fire within me", empowering him to raise his level as the title race with Vettel has closed up.

"They analysed that, and within the set-up understood there was an area the car wasn't so comfortable in. They made changes this weekend so that we didn't sit in there. Again, from this weekend we'll take some more learnings from this, and hopefully apply that.

"The learning from these two weeks should collectively put us in a better position for Singapore, but I think still Ferrari are going to be quick there - they're rapid through the medium and low-speed sections of circuits."

Singapore's Marina Bay should be a perfect track for Ferrari, in much the same way Monza was the ideal circuit for Mercedes. The next race is one Ferrari really should be in prime position to win, but if the Scuderia doesn't manage to beat Mercedes in Singapore, that really would represent a serious 'screw-up' for Vettel's championship ambitions.