Can Rory Byrne fix Ferrari's problems?

Over the Mexican Grand Prix weekend, word reached Autosport via a senior Ferrari team insider that Rory Byrne is back at Maranello on a full-time basis and hard at work on the 2017 car.

It's fair to say that we became quite excited by this tidbit of knowledge. And then we thought, "Hang on a second - haven't we been here before?"

Byrne was one of the principal architects of Ferrari's unprecedented run of success between 1999 and 2007, a skilled and creative designer brought in by team principal Jean Todt, star driver Michael Schumacher and technical director Ross Brawn in 1996.

Although he has had an office in Maranello since he went into semi-retirement at the end of 2006, for a long time his involvement with Ferrari ran to no more than a third of the year and was chiefly confined to the road car division.

He became, to some extent, a totem.

At the turn of this decade he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, but after being declared free of it in 2012 - he attributes his clean bill of health to a radical detox therapy he underwent in his adopted home of Thailand - he has become increasingly involved with the team again, popping back up as a sort of engineer-without-portfolio. Quite how deeply he has been involved, though, remains quite obscure.

He has been called back in three times to consult on the design of Ferrari's F1 machinery, first in 2012 when the car was initially troublesome, then again in '13 and '15 under different senior management regimes.

In 2013, Ferrari described him as "an extra pair of hands and eyes, if you like", part of the team working on the new hybrid car for '14, but with no official job title.

Two changes of team principal and a new technical director later, he was back working on the 2015 car, albeit in the capacity of 'mentor' to chief designer Simone Resta.

In the interim, Ferrari had not only burned through figureheads such as Stefano Domenicali and Marco Mattiacci, but also seasoned engineers with a significant track record of success, including ex-McLaren man Pat Fry, designer Nikolas Tombazis and engine guru Luca Marmorini, all of whom paid the price for the failure of the 2014 car.

Since then, the team's vehicular offerings have continued to disappoint, resulting in further scalps - chiefly technical director James Allison, a highly rated aerodynamicist and manager who will not be out of work for long after his gardening leave elapses next year.

And herein lies the real problem, one that pulling Byrne back into the fold cannot address: Ferrari has slid back into its toxic old habit of infighting.

In an interview with this author for a future issue of F1 Racing magazine, Ross Brawn adumbrated many of the reasons for that fertile period of Ferrari dominance, along with the bad habits that had to be driven out to build a winning culture.

"[By 2001] There wasn't a fear of failure because we were afraid of our jobs, there was a fear of failure because we liked winning so much," he said. "Everyone was driving each other - there was no higher force saying 'you will succeed or you'll be in trouble'.

"What I was able to get rid of was the blame culture that existed when I arrived. That was the most damaging thing.

"I recall a meeting in the early days when we'd had a glitch, and Luca di Montezemolo was about to launch a witch hunt, and I said, 'We're not going to have a witch hunt. I'm responsible for everyone so if you want to blame anybody, blame me.' The [Italian] media was very prolific over there, and there was a tendency to want to hang someone out to dry if anything went wrong.

"Jean [Todt, then the team principal] was already that way and I think some of the senior management team had started to recognise that it was the right way to operate, to protect the people below you, because they could then do a much better job."

Brawn goes into further detail on the management's media obsession in his new book Total Competition, co-written with former Williams CEO Adam Parr. You would think, to read it, that the editor of La Gazzetta dello Sport and his ilk were dictating Ferrari policy:

"When I joined, there was a view that every senior manager should know what the papers were writing about the team. There was a folio of newspaper cuttings on your desk each day.

"It would be an inch thick, and if it was a race weekend, two inches thick, and if it was an especially controversial weekend, three inches thick. You wouldn't see much done in the first hour or two of the morning, because everyone would have their coffee and read the cuttings.

"I said this was ridiculous, it's crazy filling our people's heads with all the media, so I stopped it."

Judging by the way Ferrari assiduously courts the favour of the Italian media in 2016 while pretty much slamming the shutters on everyone else, trial-by-media is back in vogue once more. The amount of engineering blood on the carpet is damning evidence of the return of the blame culture.

You can understand, therefore, the urge for quick fixes to stave off the torrent of criticism. And what better quick fix than the rehiring of a designer with as illustrious a pedigree as Byrne's?

Except that this tactic didn't work before, and it's no guarantee of success in 2017 either.

It shouldn't be this way. Ferrari builds its chassis and engines under the same roof, more or less, so it has no excuses for not being as integrated in design terms as Mercedes, where delegates from the Mercedes-Benz High Performance Powertrains facility in Brixworth are fully embedded in the meetings to determine car layout and packaging.

"I saw this great opportunity of designing a car - not an engine, not a chassis, but a complete car - and that's what Ferrari's strength should have been," said Brawn of the situation that greeted him in 1996. "But that strength wasn't really being harnessed or utilised.

"Paulo Martinelli was running the engine shop and he was very receptive to the principle of 'one car', so we put the new chassis design office next to the engine office, and we often had people working in each department crossing over. Paulo and I shared quite a few disciplines so the metallurgy department, for instance, served both of us and we would loan each other staff as needed.

"It was a nicely integrated process that meant the chassis and engine were designed as one car. And they're still like that, one entity; Mattia Binotto was head of engines and now he's the technical director.

"So they're still one group but why it's not gelling at the moment, I'm not sure."

Lack of confidence could be one of those factors. Having hired Allison (no stranger to the Maranello environment, having spent five years there as a head of aerodynamics) from Lotus as technical director, Ferrari put his nose out of joint by trying to recruit Adrian Newey from Red Bull.

Allison finally walked when Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne took it upon himself to restructure the operational practices of the team, a clear vote of no-confidence in his technical director. Ferrari has become a team that desperately buys in talent but then handles it appallingly.

Since Allison's departure, Ferrari has announced a new chief aerodynamicist, David Sanchez, but has declined to comment on what has happened to the previous holder of that post, Dirk de Beer, a prominent Allison hire. To all intents and purposes, he has disappeared.

The overall impression is one of operational chaos and savage infighting that make the Machiavellian machinations portrayed in Wolf Hall seem tame.

Rumours are now circulating the F1 paddock that Ferrari has made a big-money offer - double-your-money, even - to Mercedes' Paddy Lowe, whose contract is believed to be coming to an end. But even if he did choose to leave Brackley for Maranello, he would have to serve a period of gardening leave and would not be able to report for work until nearly the start of the 2018 season - and, therefore, have no influence on the car until the '19 design cycle.

In the interim, there would be more desperate hirings and arbitrary firings, and - who knows? - possibly even the presence of Rory Byrne might lose its lustre.

As Brawn says in his book, "The programmes are too long to start hopping around with engineers. You need consistency."

Perhaps Ferrari should pay more attention to the wisdom of its former technical director. After all, it's already tried to hire him back - and he's said no.