Ferrari must take blame for 2013 failures

After finishing second to Sebastian Vettel for the third consecutive race in the Singapore Grand Prix, Fernando Alonso offered a very simple explanation for falling out of contention for the drivers' championship

"We won in China, we won in Spain and then we seemed to lose a little bit of performance, especially when the 2012 Pirelli tyres came back," said Alonso. "That was probably our point in the championship. When they changed the tyres, we said bye-bye."

It's true that Alonso's deficit in championship to Vettel has almost tripled since the tyres changed. After the British Grand Prix, he was 21 points behind. Five races later, he is 60 points down.

This sounds damning, but in relative terms he is only eight per cent worse off than he was, for as total points increase so the gaps widen (after Silverstone, he had 84 per cent of Vettel's points, today he has 76 per cent).

When it comes to assessing the relative performance of cars, race results are often a dangerous metric.

Subject to vast number of variables - weather, safety cars, reliability, strategy, on-track incidents, traffic etc - they don't always paint the most accurate picture. After all, Alonso finished second in Singapore, but the Ferrari was not the second-best car overall.

Raw pace is a better indicator, albeit not a perfect one especially as, in the case of Ferrari, its race pace is often stronger than qualifying speed.

But looking at the fastest individual lap of each car during the course of a race weekend, expressed as a percentage, shows that Red Bull has indeed asserted itself in recent races.

This does reveal some clear trends. The pace advantage of the Mercedes for a significant part of the season and the erratic performance level of the Lotus both stand out. There is also the ominous form of Red Bull from the German GP onwards, a run of form that does indeed coincide with the change in the tyres.

But correlation does not necessarily equal causation. For a start, Ferrari was not particularly competitive at Silverstone, the race before the tyres started changed.

What's more, Red Bull has been chipping away at car developments, most eye-catchingly with a new front wing that takes endplate detail to a new high, while Ferrari has too often found upgrades not delivering the expected performance step, much to Alonso's chagrin.

Alonso was on the Silverstone podium, but Ferrari was not particularly competitive © LAT

The implication of what Alonso and the Ferrari team are saying is that the tyre change has somehow hindered their performance. This is possible, because a variation in tyres can change the aerodynamic effect of the rotating wheels and also alter the overall front/rear balance of the car.

But it is not as if the tyre change has made a super-fast car into an also-ran.

The evidence suggests that, while the tyres are significant, the idea that Ferrari is being held back by the change is misleading.

Instead it is more likely that, exactly as Pirelli predicted when it was resisting widespread calls to change the rubber before the necessity of safety forced its hand, the tyre change has allowed the underlying strength of the Red Bull to shine through.

There is a difference between saying Ferrari is being held back now and accepting that Red Bull was probably restricted by its struggles to master the tyres earlier in the season.

Alonso's two victories, in China and Spain, both owed a reasonable amount to tyre management.

In China, the Ferrari proved the car of choice on race day because the faster Mercedes simply worked its rears too hard, while the front-limited track made life difficult for Red Bull, which opted not to run Vettel during Q3 in the hope of an alternative strategy allowing it to overachieve.

While it would therefore be a leap too far to say that on the current tyres Red Bull would automatically have dominated in China, in Spain it is certainly possible, especially if recent developments are taken into account.

Red Bull struggled badly with the tyres on the Catalunya circuit, its drivers having to spend the whole race taking it easy, primarily to protect the front-left, although later in stints rear degradation also became a problem.

Ferrari's four-stop strategy was perfectly judged in Spain © LAT

Alonso, by contrast, was locked into a four-stop strategy from the start and able to drive the car pretty much to its maximum potential, which was far greater than that of a Red Bull being driven ultra-conservatively on what started as a three-stopper but became four.

Was the Ferrari a better car than Red Bull in Spain? Probably not. Was it a better package? Unquestionably yes.

Ferrari and Alonso deserve plenty of credit for their performance there but they cannot have it both ways. It is not so much that the tyres now are doing Red Bull a favour, it is more that they were hindering the team early in the season.

Ultimately, it is down to the teams to make the best of the rubber available. Just as Red Bull had to deal with its problems with the tyres early on and did not have the right to demand a change to the tyres, it has every right to benefit from changes that were made for legitimate safety reasons. And as the previous two Pirelli-shod seasons have shown, teams do generally get a better handle on the rubber as the season goes on anyway.

The bottom line for Ferrari is that for several years now, it has not done as good a job as Red Bull at car design and development.

Perhaps the tyres have sometimes helped to mask that - and credit to the team for capitalising on it - but to simply blame the change in tyres is disingenuous. After all, on a 2010 Bridgestone-type tyre, Red Bull would have vanished into the distance long before it has done this season.

The story of F1 over the past few years has been of Red Bull raising the bar technically. Yes it has formidable resources, but so does Ferrari.

Even if the tyres had continued to allow Alonso to beat Vettel in a straight fight on occasion, it would have been nothing more than a fleeting cure.

F1 has always been a technical challenge about producing the best car and it's down to the rest to raise their game.