The secrets behind Ferrari's ongoing revival

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. With a chill pill for Sebastian Vettel in Azerbaijan and Singapore, plus a different spark plug in Japan, we could be sitting here now reflecting on a full-blown title resurrection for Ferrari.

But top-level sport is not about ifs and buts, and Ferrari's Asian collapse - Vettel's needless crash in Singapore and the engine problems in Malaysia and Japan - effectively derailed what until then had been a nailbiter with Mercedes.

The cruel and dramatic nature in which it all went wrong for Ferrari overshadowed many of the positives of a campaign where a restructuring under the guidance of chief technical officer Mattia Binotto really started to deliver performance and results.

Maranello produced its fastest and most benign racing car for years, and it matched that with a development push that kept pace with Mercedes throughout. So at some levels it was a year where Ferrari exceeded almost all expectations.

The roots to this success (and failure) can be traced back to the winter of 2014-15, when former Marlboro man Maurizio Arrivabene arrived as team principal at the start of a new era under Sergio Marchionne.

The new management had inherited Vettel, an improved engine and a more competitive car, with then-technical director James Allison's influence fully unleashed after an early switch of focus to its 2015 challenger. The three wins that season should have been the launchpad for a full title assault in '16. But the tragedy that struck Allison after the Australian Grand Prix, when his wife died unexpectedly, hit the team hard.

Allison's absence, with a structure inside the team that relied so heavily on him as a focal point and leader, put Ferrari off kilter for four months as it failed to match Mercedes' impressive development rate. In the end, Allison's personal situation, and differences of opinion with Marchionne about how the team should move forward technically, led to him leaving the team in July and opening the way for a major reshuffle.

The first step was to move Binotto across from his position as head of the engine department to become chief technical officer. From the outside it seemed a strange move because, despite his vast experience in the F1 team, Binotto had never designed a racing car.

But to think like that was to not understand the different way of working that was being adopted. Binotto was not a technical chief in the old sense of being a car creator. Instead, he was more a super-manager. A championship-winning football manager does not need to know how to play in goal, how to pass a ball in midfield or how to take a penalty. But they need to understand which players can do those jobs best, how to get them all to work together and how best to get them to perform.

Ultimately, for a talented and intelligent engineer such as Binotto, the challenges of overseeing the creation of the best car need the same skillset and processes as building the benchmark engine. After all, decisions are based on data and feedback from engineers - and, whether concepts work on dynos or windtunnels, it's about simulating, creating, testing, validating and racing.

With Binotto moving across, and with direct input from Marchionne, the team adopted a wholly different approach for its technical structure. Rather than a vertical organisation with a technical director operating above department heads, Ferrari went for a more horizontal system, where talented individual staff in each area of the team had more of a say in the decision-making processes.

It helped give each department, and even individuals within them, more accountability, rather than relying on the technical director to make the final call. The well-controlled autonomy with which this empowered each department gave them more freedom for innovation and a better chance to develop themselves, rather than hitting a bottleneck with everything having to be approved from above.

As well as Arrivabene and Binotto fixing upon this system, a series of ambitious targets for the 2017 car were laid down too, very different from the approach that had been taken before.

The margins were close this year, and it's areas within its control that must be Ferrari's focus if it is to prove that 2017 was no flash in the pan

Previously, each department would have focused on producing the best it could in isolation. You would optimise the gearbox, the chassis, the aero and so on, and then bring it all together in an attempt to create what should be the ultimate car. Ferrari's approach from last summer - even though it was relatively late in the design process for the all-new 2017 regulations - was to think more holistically. The mindset from each department was more about what they could do to help as part of the overall package, rather than as an isolated element.

This helped create a unified approach to the SF70H, where each department understood where it fitted within the overall project. The result was not only a well-performing car, but one that correlated perfectly to the CFD and windtunnel - something that Red Bull and Force India struggled with at the start of the year. For Ferrari, having that baseline was essential. Correlation stayed well aligned through the year too, and each development that Ferrari brought to the track worked, proving that its new structures and process were paying off.

Ferrari made good progress on the engine front, too. It might not have totally closed the gap to Mercedes - especially in terms of 'magic' modes for qualifying - but there wasn't much in it. And the season-long controversy surrounding oil burn might have had a small impact, but in the overall scheme of things it did not define Ferrari's success or failure rate.

What did define it were two separate elements: the reliability problems in Malaysia and Japan, plus Vettel's incidents in Azerbaijan, Singapore and Mexico. The cracked manifold pipe in Malaysia and faulty spark plug in Japan might have triggered the problems, but ultimately their existence highlighted weaknesses that remain in Ferrari's infrastructure.

Although both faulty parts came from external suppliers, the team well knows that it is its own responsibility to ensure that those suppliers are up to the job, and that what they fit to the car is good enough.

It's the endless juggling act that every team goes through: balancing the push for performance against the need for reliability. It's about coping with pressure, being robust in every area. Ferrari perhaps went a step too far in this respect.

On the driving front, Vettel's questionable aggression in Azerbaijan and Singapore meant that two almost certain victories slipped through his grasp needlessly, which ultimately proved hugely costly. Singapore in particular was a race that Ferrari was clear favourite to win, with Lewis Hamilton not looking like he had the pace for the podium.

A Vettel victory, with Hamilton fourth, would have meant a 38-point swing in the championship, changing the dynamic of the year immensely. Don't forget that even the Malaysia reliability failure in qualifying only meant Vettel dropped six points on Hamilton, which is hardly a disaster if taken in isolation.

The margins were certainly close this year. Bad luck behind the safety car in China, losing out at the starts in Russia and Austria, and Mercedes' clever strategy to use Valtteri Bottas as a block in Spain, shifted what could easily have been Ferrari wins into Mercedes' hands. But those moments are part of racing, and they were all elements Ferrari had no direct control over - so can have no regrets about. It's areas within its control that must be Ferrari's focus if it is to prove that 2017 was no flash in the pan.

Ferrari has already worked on tightening up its reliability validation processes. Even before the Malaysia/Japan troubles, it was aware that this was an area of weakness, so the team had moved to pull across Fiat engineer Maria Mendoza, an expert in metals and chemicals, to help. News of her appointment only emerged after the Asian tribulations, but this was very much a planned move rather than a kneejerk response.

It's clear that the pain of this year has fired up a determination not to go through the same travails again in 2018. Its staff will be a year more experienced too, and insiders talk of Ferrari being much further forward in its processes than 12 months ago. The team can also hope that Vettel has learned his lessons.

But while there may be frustration about Azerbaijan, Singapore and Japan, the team is realistic that building a title-winning operation is not something that happens overnight. Even in Ferrari's golden era with Michael Schumacher under Jean Todt, Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne, it endured years of near-misses. Don't forget it lost the title in the final race of the season in 1997, '98 and '99.

Despite Ferrari's long history, as it heads into this winter it views itself as a young team getting used to a new structure. And for all the benefits that such youthfulness brought, as it pushed on with enthusiasm to create an innovative and brilliant design for 2017, there was a price to be paid for a lack of experience.

What Ferrari needs now, more than anything, is patience. More patience on track from the star man at the wheel; and patience off it for the processes and structures that are in place now to fully blossom and deliver what the team is capable of.

It's our bumper Formula 1 season review this week, with 66 pages of analysis, picking out the best and the worst of the 2017 campaign that culminated in a fourth world title for Lewis Hamilton. The magazine is on sale now in stores and available online here.