What is Ferrari lacking this year?

Having reached a nadir in 2014, failing to win a race for the first time since 1993, Ferrari went through a restructure and has been on the rise over the past two seasons. This year was predicted to be the one when it would be back on terms with its rivals, pushing for wins and a championship.

Yet Ferrari has not reached Mercedes' levels of performance in 2016, and with company president Sergio Marchionne demanding results, the pressure is yet again building at Maranello.

In Hungary each Ferrari failed to beat a Red Bull across the line, while being miles off Mercedes' pace. Then this week came the news that technical director James Alison would leave the team with immediate effect.

So what has gone wrong with the 'new Ferrari' and its post-2014 restructure?

Since the end of the Michael Schumacher, Jean Todt, Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne era of Ferrari dominance, the team has sought to develop and promote talent from within the organisation. This allowed continuity, and Ferrari won championships in 2007 and '08, but since '09 momentum has slowed.

That's not to say Ferrari hasn't been competitive, but subsequent cars were always a step behind the new leader, Red Bull. Even so, Ferrari had chances to win the drivers' title with Fernando Alonso in 2010 and '12, but couldn't quite get over the line.

It failed to develop effective exhaust-blowing technology in the latter days of the V8 era, and when the regulations changed to the current, complex V6 hybrid turbo formula, the new organisation failed to tackle them effectively.

Alison was hired from Lotus at the end of 2013 and he started to bring about a change in technical direction, altering working practices as much as switching staff. Jock Clear arrived from Mercedes at the end of '15 as part of this reform.

This year's SF16-H is the most conventional Ferrari of recent years, rejecting old-era inward-looking car concepts and taking in aero, suspension and powertrain packaging to match the rest of the grid.

On paper, this design had all the hallmarks to be strongly competitive. Pre-season testing and the first race in Melbourne suggested that Ferrari could be right in the fight.

It was well understood that this was a very different racing car to its predecessors, so it would take more time to understand and develop, but it had more potential than its rivals, which already had two years of R&D and were on the flatter part of their development curves.

The SF16-H has more downforce, more power, better fuel economy and stronger energy recovery systems than the previous car, while it additionally appeared to offer better turn-in (ideal for Kimi Raikkonen) while retaining the impressive tyre preservation qualities of the 2015 SF15-T.

However, teething troubles with the turbo meant the power unit was derated to maintain reliability. Running less power blunted one of Ferrari's key attributes in trying to catch Mercedes.

The reality of Ferrari's early season was one of missed opportunities, unreliability and a lack of development. Focus had to go into resolving the turbo issues, then in the latter part of the first half of the season the gearbox started to cause problems and resulted in grid penalties.

Ferrari wasn't alone in having reliability issues; Mercedes had been equally blighted, but Ferrari was never in a position to take advantage, allowing Red Bull to win the Spanish Grand Prix after the Mercedes drivers took each other out on the first lap.

Just as it's hard to pinpoint exactly what makes the Mercedes so fast, it's also hard to point at an area and say that's where the Ferrari falls down. In terms of specific car performance, the Ferrari is close on nearly every level, but crucially falls short on so many of them.

On the chassis side, the car lacks downforce compared to Mercedes. The car doesn't sport all the detailed aero parts that mark out Mercedes and Red Bull as leaders in this area. Arguably the 2016 Ferrari lacks some of the more detailed aero parts that were present on its '15 car!

Development on the current chassis has been disappointing for a team with Ferrari's resources and the rate of major new parts making it to the car is slow. Many of the key areas for aero development on the Ferrari are still similar, if not identical, to how they were in Melbourne.

Lacking downforce means aero efficiency has to be played with, running less downforce and risking the tyres sliding and overheating, or running too much downforce and letting the drag eat up horsepower on the straights.

Even within the resource-restrictive rules on aero testing, it's hard to explain why Ferrari appears to be lacking in this area given its personnel and resources.

At the other end of the speed spectrum, the car also struggles for traction, although this may be tyre related. But equally the root cause could be downforce, suspension, power unit, race engineering, or a combination of all of these.

Massively improved since 2014 is Ferrari's power unit, now a near match for Mercedes with power and energy recovery. With Mahle lean-burn technology, Ferrari's fuel consumption has been much improved for a given power output. However, Mercedes operates a different combustion technology, not one linked to the pre-chamber set-up of the Mahle/Ferrari jet ignition.

Perhaps because of this, Mercedes is clearly able to turn up the power for qualifying, to the tune of several tenths in Q3. Ferrari's combustion tech doesn't appear to allow a full-boost, fuel-rich qualifying mode, so along with its tyre heating issues and gearbox penalties, grid positions are compromised.

Being behind on the grid counters Ferrari's strong points: consistently fast starts and good race tyre management. Now that Red Bull is often occupying the spaces between Ferrari and Mercedes on the grid, the races are tougher than they need to be.

With all but three development tokens now spent on the turbo, MGU-H and cam profiles, Ferrari is near the end of its 2016 engine development path. The remaining three tokens could be spent on a major combustion upgrade, but this may not be enough to change everything required to give that qualifying boost.

So the car needs work on all sides, but the direction to do that is now diminished, as Allison has split with the team, leaving Marchionne, team principal Maurizio Arrivabene and the newly-promoted Mattia Binotto to lead the technical departments.

It is most likely that Binotto - previously the head of Ferrari's engine department and the man credited with engineering the most successful element of its recent technical revival - is just an interim candidate for the technical director role, and Ferrari will seek a direct replacement for Allison in what is a particularly tough leadership position.

F1 is full of top-line engineers at the technical director level; most teams have as many as three people who could fill a front-of-grid technical director position, and as many again could be a chief designer.

But unlike most other teams, Ferrari's technical director role isn't as simple as that. Perhaps more so than in any other organisation, the Ferrari technical director has to be a politician - guiding the departments, dealing with the top-level management, and juggling all of the associated priorities and vested interests.

This requires a steadfast plan, a firm hand and a degree of diplomacy. Often the Ferrari technical director role has been an ejector seat for those unable to deal with the internal and external pressures of leading the engineering side of the Scuderia.

It also means that without such a person, in the interim, the focus on the remainder of 2016 and planning for '17 is just as likely to be the subject of conflict as much as the '14 car was.

This immediately risks Ferrari's hopes of regaining the upper hand in the near future, as it is understood that Marchionne, below with Allison at Monza last year, wants wins this season and development must therefore remain focused on the SF16-H (project 667) as well as the new car (project 668) for 2017.

So who could fill such a role? Who would want to?

There's a wealth of talent in F1, but looking at the candidates there are few with the heavyweight track record necessary to fill the vacancy.

Ross Brawn is a popular choice, but the retired - and apparently quite happily so - previous Ferrari technical chief is not likely to come back in a permanent role. I wouldn't totally discount the chance of a consulting position, something his former co-worker Rory Byrne also does for Ferrari, but that would still leave the technical director position vacant.

Another fan choice is Red Bull's Adrian Newey, but he has already taken a step back from F1 to focus on his other avenues of technical interest. Newey came close to working for Ferrari previously, but it's unlikely he would now sign for the Scuderia on a full-time basis.

This means the net has to spread wider. Paddy Lowe appears to be quite happy - and successful - at Mercedes, so would the lure of Ferrari be enough?

If not Mercedes' top man, then perhaps some of his senior colleagues? Aldo Costa and Geoff Willis are both good choices. Costa was, of course, a previous Ferrari technical director and split with the team when Pat Fry came on board in 2011. Costa's subsequent criticism of Ferrari could count against him, but on the other hand make him ideal to sort out its problems!

Willis is a dark horse for the role. After his spell with BAR-Honda he went on to sort out Red Bull's engineering under Adrian Newey, and subsequently performed a similar role in developing the resources and R&D facilities at Brackley for Mercedes.

As a wise pair of hands and a fluent Italian speaker, in my mind he may be ideal for the job.

Bob Bell - now back at Enstone with Renault, but having performed a similar role to Willis at Mercedes - would be another ideal candidate.

A name put forward by most of the media is Toro Rosso's James Key. There's no doubt he's doing a brilliant job, and now has extensive experience of the Italian way of working at STR's Faenza base, but Key is not someone who would relish the media attention that comes with the top technical job at Ferrari.

He's a quiet and effective manager, but perhaps one not suited to the Machiavellian political shenanigans of Maranello.

However, in a role with either Willis or Bell as the figurehead, I think Key would be a huge benefit to Ferrari.

With these examples, or perhaps technical staff from other categories of motorsport, any person hired would need to work out their contract, most likely on gardening leave. This means it's unlikely a definitive Ferrari technical director would be in place before Melbourne 2017, and more likely at least six months later.

So 2016 would be a write-off, as would '17. Which means their first influence would not be until '18, then taking several seasons to mature the operation.

That spells a potential two to three seasons of Ferrari being below its best, drawing out a situation of underperformance and underachievement that has already gone on for far too long.