Why a forgettable Ferrari was important in its F1 revamp

Fortunes wax and wane in Formula 1, and it has been forever thus. In the early 1990s, the teams that the late Enzo Ferrari had so uncharitably labelled as “garagistes” were ruling the roost, while the squad bearing his own name had suffered a short and sharp decline at the turn of the decade.

After contending for titles in 1990 with a John Barnard-designed car and Alain Prost behind the wheel, both of those constituent elements had departed the team over 1991. Barnard left for Benetton, while Prost was released following his increasingly antagonistic relationship with Ferrari’s management, unhappy with the 643 chassis introduced during the season.

Ferrari’s 1992 offering, the double-floor F92A penned by Jean-Claude Migeot, was a disaster. The Frenchman had been signed after his work developing the successful Tyrrell 019 and, although his team could do little about the engine giving up power through blow-by, straightline performance was hampered further by the aerodynamics.

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The engineers had failed to tune in floor stall at certain speeds, so the car was running around with excess drag on the straights because the downforce could not be shed. Harvey Postlethwaite rejoined the team and hoped that rebuilding the rear end around a transverse gearbox would help, but to no avail.

With just 21 points scored that year, Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo chose to ring the changes for 1993. Migeot was let go at the start of the year, albeit with the F93A already in production at that stage.

According to Migeot, the car he left was based upon the F92A chassis, and Ferrari had struggled up to that point to find the active suspension advances that the other frontrunners had achieved. Postlethwaite remained for the first half of the year, but had already felt put upon by the political undercurrent present at Maranello as Montezemolo continued to wield the hatchet.

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images

Twin floor F92A concept was a failure and meant Ferrari entered another period of rebuilding

On the driving front, Jean Alesi offered much-needed continuity in his third season with the team, while Gerhard Berger rejoined for 1993 after two years away with McLaren. Regardless, it was already set up to be a transitional year, particularly as key personnel changes that laid the foundations for subsequent successes did not happen until later in the season.

Jean Todt was not due to join up until mid-way through the campaign and, while Ferrari had managed to recapture the services of Barnard, the Briton was largely focused on 1994. As Alesi lays out, the lack of technical clarity hurt the 1993 car’s development considerably.

“1993 of course was a new season, but a kind of an intermediate season anyway,” Alesi reflects. “Jean Todt came to the team in the middle of the season; as I once said in an interview, in five years, I had four team principals, so you can imagine the mess at the time.

Work on the engine helped reliability towards the end of the season, as the valves and camshafts were perfected within the sprawling 3.5-litre powerplant, and its growing power helped Alesi bag second in an attritional Italian Grand Prix

“I knew we were facing a difficult season because it was not 100% clear who was designing the car, and who was really leading the project. [Migeot] left and I understood that was not a good idea and basically, we faced a bad season straight away.”

The double-floor design from 1992 had been discarded, with a more conventional sidepod arrangement installed in the F93A, but the team felt that it also had to delve into the world of active suspension to be competitive against the Williams and McLaren cars of the time. Ferrari had experimented with it in 1992, with Nicola Larini effectively running as a test mule in the last two races of the season after Ivan Capelli had been ousted, and a revised version was baked into the F93A’s design.

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Berger scored a point first time out at Kyalami, but Alesi suffered the first of multiple issues with his active ride system and retired. The team managed just one finish over the next three races as more suspension problems and gearbox issues reared their heads, although Berger managed another point at Barcelona, where Alesi retired with an oil leak.

The F93A did, however, manage three podium finishes throughout the year. The first was Alesi’s run to third place at Monaco, a drive he suggested was “much more coming from the feeling I had” after he had encountered a balanced car that weekend. There, he enjoyed a vintage drive from fifth on the grid, albeit helped by Prost’s jumped-start penalty.

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images

After Berger's dramatic lap one crash with Andretti, Alesi did at least finish in Brazil but was out of the points

Next time out at Montreal, he suffered from an engine failure, despite Ferrari’s continuing development of its new V12 for the season. The work on the engine helped reliability towards the end of the season, as the valves and camshafts were perfected within the sprawling 3.5-litre powerplant, and its growing power helped Alesi bag second in an attritional Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

Although sometimes problematic, the engine was much more powerful than 1992’s effort; instead, the F93A’s key bugbear continued to remain its inconsistent active suspension package. Alesi, certainly no advocate for the driver aids revolution, found the micromanagement of drivers’ inputs far too excessive.

“At the beginning, everything was permitted,” he explains. “At this time, a clever engineer should reduce the system as much as possible, and not try to use it everywhere. It was, in our case on the straight, we were pulling up the nose to have less drag and to go faster on the straight, and then going down in the corner, going up at the exit.

“It was too much operation during one lap. After the first laps we were doing with the engineer, we were deciding the ride height of the car metre by metre and, when we were crossing the finish line, to reset lap after lap.”

During test sessions, the active suspension sometimes seemed to have a mind of its own; Alesi recalled a time when the car apparently moved up and down of its own volition when the engine was fired up. Later in the season at the Portuguese GP Berger suffered a hefty crash as he left the pitlane, immediately careening into the wall on the opposite side of the track.

He narrowly missed Derek Warwick’s Footwork, and then-BBC commentator Jonathan Palmer laid the blame at Berger’s door for apparently being too leaden-footed on the accelerator. This was later revealed to be a problem with the Ferrari’s active ride failing to reset properly. Alesi takes up the story.

“I don’t know if you remember the big accident of Gerhard in Estoril, but that was caused by the system,” he recounts. “He came in for the pitstop, he had the nose up and the rear of the car down. And we had zero reset because it didn’t cross the finish line. When they changed the tyres and then when he left the box, it was basically on the floor and there was a big bump at the exit of the pitlane. The car struck the ground and he lost the rear.”

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Desire to emulate Williams with its active ride system was admirable, but it had its flaws and Alesi never gelled with it

“I didn’t like [the active suspension] – it killed the feeling, 100%,” Alesi adds. “So if the car was efficient, of course it’s useful, but my way to drive was very old style. The weight transfer made by the driver was very important to make the corner in a V, and it affected the car a lot.

“But because you have the active suspension, you just have to wait for the program to do basically what you were doing at the time without it. I had a very good race in Estoril, and it’s because I took out the system and I had the normal suspension!”

In the background, Todt was beginning to exert his influence. Postlethwaite did not hang around and returned to Tyrrell. Barnard had been tempted back to Ferrari for the start of 1993, with the plan to work with Postlethwaite at Maranello on debugging the F93A. But Barnard, having refused to move to Italy in his first stint with the team and instead allowed to set up a UK-based technical department in Godalming, wanted the same terms.

The performance shortcomings that became quickly apparent had enfranchised Montezemolo to make the changes he felt were necessary to take Ferrari out of the doldrums

His influence on the 1993 car was limited because his focus was on getting the 1994 car together, so his main remit was to assist with the development of the active suspension. This was at Ferrari’s behest despite it being banned for 1994, and Barnard disliked having to do it – not least because Ferrari’s system had already been conceived as early as 1989 during his first stint at the team. To his mind, interference from upper management resulted in it being canned in the first place, and now they wanted it on the car.

The compromise in working from the UK was that Barnard had to accommodate technical figures from Maranello, but Alesi felt that the working relationship was too one-sided in the Briton’s favour. He dismissed Barnard’s efforts on the active ride element as “not so good”, and admits that he has few good memories about working with him.

“When he came [back to Ferrari], I was very impressed because of his name and what he has done in the past,” says Alesi. “But the way he was working was not really good, because he was in England. He was not with us all the time, so it was difficult to work, you know?

“I don’t have a very good memory about John’s time in Ferrari. And when Michael [Schumacher] arrived, the first thing they did was they fired him. And we know what happened next…”

Even if Barnard was effectively a recluse amid the engineering structure, the cars he developed for the team were at least race winners.

Photo by: Ercole Colombo

Todt's arrival marked a revamp in Ferrari's fortunes, although Barnard's second stint at Ferrari wasn't a lengthy one

The driver-aids ban ultimately helped Ferrari because it had consistently missed the mark throughout the electronics revolution, and the neatly penned 412 T1 developed for 1994 proved to be a far more competitive prospect. Multiple signings from Honda’s aborted F1 project, including director Osamu Goto, ensured that engine development was bolstered by those with recent title success, helping the team overcome its early 1990s slump.

It’s a forgettable car, the F93A; the white stripe around the engine cover made the car reminiscent of the previous year’s Scuderia Italia Dallara, and pithy commentators would argue that it performed similarly. But it’s also an important car in Ferrari’s history, since the performance shortcomings that became quickly apparent had enfranchised Montezemolo to make the changes he felt were necessary to take Ferrari out of the doldrums.

The course that Montezemolo and Todt charted for Ferrari in the following years was enough to convince Benetton’s title-winning trifecta of Michael Schumacher, Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne to enlist, setting up the period of unprecedented dominance that defined the early 2000s.

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The F93A is easily forgotten in Ferrari's history, but marked an important turning point on its road to success under Todt