The crucial cars of Ferrari's F1 history

There's a compelling reason why Ferrari enjoys - for now at least - a preferential share of the commercial takings of F1, beyond what's due from its placing in the constructors' championship.

Dozens of teams have come and gone, leaving barely a ripple. But what would F1 be like without Ferrari, a marque that's been part of the fabric of the sport since day one? It's unthinkable.

Win, lose or flunk, cars bearing the Prancing Horse insignia are infused with a dose of Enzo charisma, even now, almost three decades after the founder's death. Enzo Ferrari lived to race: he built and sold road cars only to fund the Scuderia, and his team lives on because of that passion, regardless of modern corporate niceties.

There have been crashing lows as well as dominant highs; stinkers alongside works of engineering genius. But to look upon a Ferrari F1 car is to gaze deep into the soul of the sport itself.

1950s

Ferrari 500

Enzo Ferrari was conflicted when Formula 1 stuttered and almost died in 1952, because he felt a lingering tug of affection for the departed Alfa Romeo and their potent supercharged F1 cars, whose design he had championed while working for them in the 1930s. But he got over it well enough, for motor racing's loss would be his gain: in the absence of enough decent F1 cars to populate grids, world championship races were open solely to Formula 2 machines for 1952-53. And Enzo already had a basic F2 car ready to go.

There was nothing particularly big or clever about the Ferrari 500. It was simply a reworked version of the Scuderia's previous F2 car: a ladder chassis with transverse leaf springs up front and a De Dion axle at the rear, now located by trailing arms, but with a simpler and much more effective engine.

Gioacchino Colombo's V12 architecture would remain a mainstay of the Ferrari range for years to come, but in dainty two-litre form it had been well beaten in F2. Consequently, Enzo directed his new chief engineer, Aurelio Lampredi, to design a four-cylinder twin-cam engine as an alternative. It was competitive from the off.

Piero Taruffi won the first of the world championship rounds for Ferrari, but thereafter it was Alberto Ascari all the way - apart from at the Indy 500, which Ascari nevertheless had a crack at in a V12 car based on the '51 F1 chassis. The anomalous Indianapolis rounds apart, a Ferrari 500 won every world championship grand prix from May 1952, until Maserati racer Juan Manuel Fangio broke their run at Monza on 13 September 1953. Ascari's nine consecutive wins, equalled but never exceeded, underline Ferrari's absolute dominance of the F2 era.

Tech spec

1960s

Ferrari 156 'sharknose'

Grudgingly and without great joy, Enzo Ferrari, who believed the horse should pull the cart, not push it, embraced the notion of rear drive after a season of being given the runaround by the nimble little British chassis he had dismissed as the products of garagistes. Over the winter of 1959, Ferrari's engineers, led by Carlo Chiti, laboured in secret. They used a second-hand Cooper chassis bought as a reference to hack about a front-engined 246 Dino chassis so the V6 engine could be placed behind the driver.

None of the drivers cared for the 246P's rear-heavy balance, so it raced just once in this form, driven to a fifth-place finish by Richie Ginther at Monaco. Its second coming was at Monza, this time with a 1.5-litre version of the V6 providing the shove. Since F2 cars were present on the grid only because the British teams had boycotted the race, it earned little attention. More fool them.

Over the winter F1 downsized to 1.5-litres, catching out British teams who had arrogantly believed the change wouldn't go ahead. And just as had happened in 1952, Enzo had a car and engine ready to go. Chiti's 156 was a wishbone-suspended tube-frame chassis, evolved from the 246P but slimmer in profile. This made it better able to minimise air-resistance with less power pushing the car. To maximise that advantage and reduce the centre of gravity, Chiti flattened the 'vee' from 65° to 120°. The radiators were fed by distinctive nostril air intakes.

With up to 40bhp more than their competitors - essentially a third as much again - Ferrari were almost all-conquering in 1961, save for Stirling Moss's genius at Monaco and the Nurburgring. Phil Hill wrapped up the title at Monza, but the triumph was soured by the death of his team-mate, Wolfgang von Trips, so the team chose to skip the final round in the USA.

The 156 was unable to maintain its superiority over a second season, though. Over the winter Chiti organised a walkout of senior engineering staff, development was halted, and Ferrari's rivals duly cashed in.

Tech spec

1970s

Ferrari 312T3

Ranged against an army of Cosworth V8s, and BRM and Matra V12s, Ferrari's mighty 3.5-litre flat-12 had character and power in spades. But what it didn't have was a decent chassis to fire into the distance. All that changed, though, with the T generation of 312 cars in 1975.

This came about after a typical Ferrari clearing-of-the-decks in which Enzo appointed a young Luca di Montezemolo to run the team, who, in turn, rescued engineer Mauro Forghieri from corporate exile. The resulting 312T took Niki Lauda to the world championship in 1975, and again in T2 form in 1977.

Forghieri's comprehensive re-engineering of the 312 concept focused primarily on weight distribution, with a redesigned aluminium monocoque chassis and a new transverse five-speed gearbox. The flat-12 engine already carried its weight low, but its sheer length had entailed hanging the gearbox behind the rear axle - creating terminal understeer. Packaging the transmission ahead of the axle sweetened 
the handling to title-winning effect.

By 1978, though, the game had moved on, and the arrival of Michelin had kicked off a tyre war. Sensing an opportunity, Enzo Ferrari threw in his lot with the ambitious French tyre firm. Forghieri duly redesigned the 312T from nose to tail, creating the 312T3 with an updated chassis, a longer wheelbase, double wishbones replacing rocker arms, and new bodywork fettled in the Pininfarina windtunnel.

Ferrari had lost Lauda to Brabham, but gained the exuberantly talented Gilles Villeneuve to partner silky-smooth Carlos Reutemann. It was a dream pairing, and when Reutemann won the second race of '78 in the old T2, then followed that up with victory at round four at Long Beach, in the new T3, it seemed he had a shot at the title.

Unfortunately for Reutemann, in Belgium Lotus introduced the 79, a car that would redefine the genre...

Tech spec

1980s

Ferrari 126C4

The ground-effect era had left Ferrari baffled and pitched the team into a new era of catastrophic infighting. It was gleefully presided over by the Old Man himself, who delighted in sponsoring 'creative tension'. Ground effect suited the Cosworth-powered British teams but ruthlessly exposed Ferrari's poor understanding of aerodynamics and the unsuitability of their flat-12 engine, whose inlet trumpets projected into the space that on other cars was profitably occupied by downforce-generating venturi.

The most obvious solution amid a bout of hirings and firings was to play to Ferrari's traditional strength, and Enzo's passion: the engine. Embracing the turbocharging approach pioneered by Renault back in 1977 was intended to be the cure for all ills. Harvey Postlethwaite was recruited at the end of 1981 to drastically re-engineer the woeful first attempt, the 126CK, and the 120° turbocharged V6 played a part in bringing the team back into the winners' circle.

Postlethwaite's C2 and C3 handled far better than their predecessor and were more aerodynamically sound. These were testing times as civil war raged within the sport, and Ferrari were knocked for six by Gilles Villleneuve's fatal accident in 1982. Yet the Scuderia came through to win the constructors' championship in 1982 and 1983 - just not the drivers' title.

The C3 was Ferrari's first carbon-fibre monocoque, and Postlethwaite evolved it over the winter of 1984 to become the C4. But its 
main weakness - the weighty cast-iron block 
of the wide-angle engine - did not change.

Ranged against the all-new McLaren MP4/2, 
a thoroughly aero-optimised package with a tailor-made TAG-Porsche turbo V6 tuned for economy as well as power, the 126C4 was found wanting. Michele Alboreto won at Zolder, but retired from eight other races, frequently due to engine failure, as McLaren's Niki Lauda and Alain Prost swept the board.

Tech spec

1990s

Ferrari 641

Having watched with mounting fury as his cars were trounced on track by John Barnard-designed McLarens, Enzo Ferrari came to a logical conclusion - and poached Barnard at the end of 1986. Barnard had fallen out with McLaren boss Ron Dennis and was keen to leave, but was aware of his market value to the extent that he secured a great financial deal and persuaded Enzo to bankroll a new design office, not in Maranello, but in Shalford - a sleepy village between Guildford and Godalming.

Working from the grandly named Guildford Technical Office, Barnard and his team faxed their completed designs page by page through to Maranello, where they were painstakingly reassembled and rendered into carbon-fibre reality. What could possibly go wrong?

Somehow, amid Ferrari's notorious internal political wranglings, a situation exacerbated by the power vacuum following Enzo's death in August 1988, Barnard created some beautiful racing machines while working remotely. The 1987 and '88 cars followed an upward trajectory of competitiveness, thanks in part to Ferrari's new windtunnel, before Barnard delivered his game-changer in '89. Despite reliability niggles - Nigel Mansell's win first time out at the 1989 season-opening Brazilian GP was the first time the car had completed a race distance - the 640, with its screaming V12 and semi-automatic gearbox, was beautiful and astonishingly quick.

Sadly, it wasn't fast or reliable enough to beat McLaren to either world title, and so Barnard, worn down by the infighting, moved to Benetton for 1990. Design work on the 640 was completed by Enrique Scalabroni and Steve Nichols, who joined from McLaren along with world champion Alain Prost.

Mechanically similar to its predecessor, the new car had a larger fuel tank and a more conventional engine air intake, but retained its svelte good looks. Scalabroni and Nichols had focused on improving its reliability, but the 641 still let Mansell down enough for him to announce his retirement from F1 mid-season. Prost, though, won five grands prix and was denied the title only when his bitter rival, Ayrton Senna, drove him off the track at Suzuka.

The 641 is still one of the most beautiful F1 cars of all time. The proof? There's one in New York's Museum of Modern Art...

Tech spec

2000s

Ferrari F1-2000

In the years following Enzo Ferrari's death, his team grew so dysfunctional that only a complete change of management could turn around its on-track fortunes. Jean Todt was headhunted to take charge in 1993 and empowered from above to transform the working culture at Maranello. Even so, it still took six years - and the import of Michael Schumacher and tech gurus Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne from Benetton - to flush out the toxic mindset of divisiveness and infighting.

By 1999 Ferrari had a car capable of winning the world championship, and might actually have done so had Schumacher not broken his leg in a crash at Silverstone. Eddie Irvine stepped into the breach, but wasn't quite up to the task. Yet within the team, there was a sense that they were now on the cusp of something big.

While main rivals McLaren decided that Mika Häkkinen's title defence would be better served by a completely new car, Byrne focused on evolving the existing Ferrari, tweaking and fettling it from nose to tail but retaining the same philosophy. The chief difference was the all-new engine, but even that represented just a few cautious steps down a wide-angle road that many rivals (especially Renault) had charged down at full pelt. Opening out the 'vee' of the engine lowered the centre of gravity and offered tantalising aerodynamic possibilities, but at the cost of a weaker structure prone to failing under the torsional stress. As such, Ferrari moved from a 75° vee to 90° but would go no further.

Mercedes had the most powerful engine in F1, but the FO110J was on the limit in terms of reliability. Failures for Häkkinen in the first two rounds of 2000 as Schumacher won the first three, set up a deficit from which he struggled to recover. Michael bounced back from four mid-season DNFs to rack up a nine wins and earn Ferrari their first drivers' title in two decades - and begin an era of unprecedented dominance.

Tech spec

2010s

Ferrari SF15-T

Born into Ferrari's latest era of revolving-door management and patchy performance, the SF15-T was Ferrari's most consistently competitive car for several seasons, even though it wasn't quite strong enough to beat the all-conquering Mercedes to world championship honours. Enzo Ferrari's abiding belief was that the engine was the most important part of a car, so it's fitting that in an era characterised by engines (or 'power units' as we must call them now) it was a radical improvement to the ERS-augmented turbo V6 that delivered the uplift.

Ferrari's first stab at a hybrid F1 power unit had lacked outright power: it was less drivable because its ERS lacked operational finesse, and further inefficiencies in the hybrid system took their toll on overall race pace. But over the winter of 2014/15, the Scuderia found an estimated 65bhp and, crucially, made a much better go of the hybrid system. That, along with technical director James Allison's focus on ensuring the car was gentle on its tyres, made the SF15-T a highly competitive prospect over the opening races of the 2015 season.

They paid the price for that gentleness in qualifying, however. Drivers Sebastian Vettel, who had replaced Fernando Alonso following Alonso's fall-out with the previous team management over a tempestuous 2014, and Kimi Räikkönen, struggled to 'switch on' the tyres and get the best out of them over a single lap. But during the races it was a very different story, enabling Vettel to bag 13 podium finishes, of which three were outright victories. His first, in Malaysia, came entirely on merit, as he started from second on the grid, fended off Nico Rosberg's Mercedes, and then beat Lewis Hamilton to the line fair and square.

Mercedes won the development race over the course of the season, though, and after taking his final win of the year in Singapore, Vettel was consigned to 'best of the rest' status.

Tech spec