What's the real reason Ferrari has gone off the rails?

In terms of outright performance, the past two weekends have been Ferrari's worst since the opening round. And in Australia its struggles were masked by a fortuitous win, gifted by the otherwise dominant Mercedes team getting its maths wrong during the race.

As the season went on, the comparative performance between Ferrari and Mercedes - based on our supertimes that take each car's fastest lap of a weekend expressed as a percentage of the outright fastest - has been fairly evenly matched.

Often Ferrari found a small advantage. It had a quicker car than Mercedes on outright pace in nine of the first 14 races up to and including the Italian Grand Prix.

Going into the summer break, it seemed Ferrari had the edge, something that its victory in the first race after the break at Spa confirmed.

But you can never discount Mercedes. It hasn't won the last four double world championships by accident.

This graph shows the battle between Mercedes and Ferrari as the season has progressed; I've taken their fastest laptime over the race weekend and converted that into a percentage of the fastest time for that weekend.

Ferrari versus Mercedes race by race performance

How title rivals' pace has compared

So factoring in recent performances. Mercedes has been fastest seven times and Ferrari eight (plus a ninth race where it outperformed Mercedes but was behind Red Bull in Monaco).

But it's race wins that pay the bills, and that paints a very different picture: Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes have taken eight and Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel five. That adds up to a 50-point lead in the drivers' championship and 53-point lead in the constructors'.

Regardless of qualifying performance - and Ferrari has been particularly strong in that regard at several grands prix this season - you never know what the outcome of a race will actually be until the chequered flag falls. Vettel needs to take some responsibility for the points deficit because he has thrown away potential race wins - or at least some opportunities to score more highly.

Germany was more or less a sure thing for the win, and Vettel alone made a small but novice-like error while leading and slid off into the barrier.

Ferrari seems to have cracked under the pressure. The body language of everyone there, including Vettel, is not that of a team with confidence

As for the other errors and missed opportunities, I think his mistakes were too early in the races to make any wild assumptions of what the results might have been - but they certainly cost him.

Ferrari has also tripped up as a team. Taking Sochi as an example, come pitstop time the running order was Valtteri Bottas, Hamilton and Vettel. Bottas pitted at the end of lap 12 and changed to the soft tyres; Vettel should have followed him in, but instead Ferrari waited a lap and lost time to Bottas.

More importantly, it lost a lap of potential undercut time advantage to Hamilton. Vettel did jump ahead when Hamilton pitted a lap after him, enabling him to briefly occupy second place, but the gap wasn't big enough to hold on to it.

Using the DRS, Hamilton was able to hustle Vettel into a mistake and take the place back. That allowed Mercedes to deploy team orders and ensure Hamilton outscored Vettel by 10 points in Russia.

It's not just one weekend that defines the championship outcome. Mercedes just seems to have kept its collective head down and worked its way through the problems.

Ferrari, however, seems to have cracked under the pressure. The body language of everyone there, including Vettel, is not that of a team with confidence in the direction it's heading. Vettel's surprisingly relaxed attitude after the races shows he must know now it's just another championship slipping through his fingers.

It could be a lack of development, but Ferrari is still coming to the races with updates so we have to assume that these updates are positive.

Could it be that Mercedes has just done a better job lately? Or is there more to it than that?

We haven't heard so much from Toto Wolff or anyone else lately about how Mercedes was slightly confused by how Ferrari was so competitive in the middle of the season.

Is that because Mercedes was able to introduce engine developments that overcame this deficit, or was Ferrari, as some suspected, pushing the boundaries just that little bit too far - and has now been quietly pulled back by the FIA?

If something like that was going on and Ferrari really has been pegged back by the governing body, then it will be the first to know that making up for its loss will be more or less impossible. So it just needs to bite the bullet and get on with it.

Its relative performance in the past two races themselves has been better than in qualifying, which would suggest it has lost the big advantage it had from being able to turn up the engine performance for those vital qualifying laps.

One area Mercedes has definitely improved is on traction out of the slower corners after some investigation following Spa, where the car was weak out of the chicane and the La Source hairpin. The resulting suspension setup improvements appear to have made a difference.

That will also make a difference coming on to some straights and that, combined with improved tyre understanding, has certainly helped to reduce rear-tyre degradation.

Since Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne stepped back from his role and then passed away mid-season, Ferrari appears to have lost focus.

If Bottas doesn't want difficult decisions to have to be made by the team management, he needs to perform better

He was hard, but fair, and made sure that everyone involved felt their responsibility in the team's success (or lack of success, as the case may be). He stopped Ferrari falling into the 'grande casino' way of doing things and made it focus on how to progress.

I don't think we will ever know the real reason that it has all gone wrong for Ferrari, but with five races to go it looks like the championship is more or less over. If Hamilton preserves his lead, he won't have to turn up for the last two races.

Looking at the Sochi weekend itself, Hamilton took yet another win at the expense of polesitter and initial race leader Bottas, who was told by the team mid-race to let Hamilton through.

Bottas was very disappointed afterwards, and understandably so, but he needs to look at the bigger picture. This is race 16 of a 21-race season, and going into it Hamilton had a 110-point lead over Bottas.

If he doesn't want team management to have to make these difficult decisions, he needs to perform better from the start of the season. F1 is a team sport and winning the championships is everything.

Come this period of the season, accumulating a few extra championship points can be critical, and if they are available then it would be foolish to throw them away.

The race itself was actually quite good, mainly because of Max Verstappen's drive from 19th to fifth with some fantastic overtakes in the early laps.

But something really has to be done about these engine penalties. They have now got to a level where is actually embarrassing for F1 and destroying the racing up front.

The fans come to races to watch cars being driven by their heroes around the track, not sitting in the garage for 'tactical' reasons during qualifying.

We've been there before when the regulations compromised the cars running on the track; and now, with the engine penalties and the ability to choose which tyres you start the race on if you are not in the top 10, the spectacle has suffered once again. Q2 was rendered pointless by the five 'eliminated' cars not running at all.

Yes, I know that Mercedes and Ferrari have done what was expected of all the manufacturers, and are not suffering the same reliability problems as Renault or Honda, but for the bigger picture and the good of F1 it's time to drop this three engine rule and allow at least five for the season. This would still control costs, but it would react to the situation we currently have.

If we still need a penalty after that, it should be team and driver points, preferably weighted towards the team but the driver needs to suffer some pain as well.

I would suggest something like a 20-point penalty for the team for a complete power unit replacement and a 10-point penalty for the driver. Something like that would dissuade teams from introducing new units for the sake of it, and it would mean that qualifying would be critical because your qualifying position would be your actual start position.

Ahead of the Russian Grand Prix weekend we had the news that Antonio Giovinazzi will drive for Sauber next year. This is the one thing Ferrari has done correctly: maintaining its commitment to the young driver campaign.

Promoting Charles Leclerc to the works team and placing Giovinazzi at Sauber shows that Ferrari believes in its young drivers. There will be a big reward for doing so.

On the other hand, we have Mercedes. It has Esteban Ocon and George Russell on its books and now that the musical chairs have stopped they have nowhere to go for next season - mainly because of their Mercedes connections.

Williams still has two seats available and it uses Mercedes engines, so for me it's very simple - Wolff needs to stop talking about three-car teams and stick by the commitments and financial investment in these two very talented drivers. Act as Ferrari has done and place them in the Williams team.