Mark Hughes: F1's Inside Line

Take a look at the Ferrari and McLaren launch news and pictures. It's our first glimpse of the two cars that will probably be fighting out the destiny of the 2008 world title.

Last year featured an epic championship contest between the two teams, a long way clear of the rest. But only rarely did that translate into the individual races. The diametrically opposed characteristics of the F2007 and the MP4-22 meant that usually one or the other of them was dominant at any given track.

So the Ferrari owned Albert Park, Barcelona, Magny-Cours, Silverstone, Istanbul, Spa and Interlagos whereas the McLaren was in a class of its own at Monte Carlo, Montreal, Indianapolis, the Hungaroring and Monza. That left just five of the 17 races where the performance of the two types of car were closely matched on the day and in two of those - the Nurburgring and Fuji - this came about only thanks to some help from the weather.

Essentially the Ferrari was the car to have on fast, high entry speed type of track, the McLaren on slow or bumpy circuits. The silver car handled kerbs much better and so was untouchable at venues like Montreal and Monza that place a lot of emphasis on that. It also had better traction and used its tyres better on a qualifying lap. The Ferrari was kinder to the rubber over a race stint.

The red machine had superior high speed aerodynamics; it gave more downforce for a given level of drag (or less drag for a given level of downforce) and its aero performance was more consistent and predictable as the car went into yaw - ie there wasn't such a big change in the aerodynamic grip as the car's angle to the airflow changed as it entered a corner.

Don't just take my word for it. Here's what McLaren's Martin Whitmarsh says about the shortfall of its '07 car relative to the Ferrari: "At the beginning of the year, braking modulation and feel was a weak point for us compared with them. Ferrari's car has been stronger in long, high speed corners. We tended to overwork tyres in long corners with the tyres getting too hot and still being too hot by the time it arrived at the next corner. I suspect Ferrari have been better in yaw and steer sensitivity in their aerodynamics.

"As the season went on we got better on braking and I believe we ended up better than them on that. We had better traction than them all year. We have qualified better but their car was better on the tyres in high speed corners, but in low speed corners it was the other way around. They were sliding a bit more than us, had a bit more understeer. Their natural weight distribution seemed better than ours, although we responded with some aspects of suspension geometry."

Ferrari was analysing McLaren's performance just as closely. Here's their man Aldo Costa on the comparison: "Our competitor was strong on bumpy circuits or striking kerbs. It is independent from the wheelbase concept. Rather, it is a particular problem of how to cope with the higher load variations that you can have on the car in these circumstances. We had an advantage compared to them on the overall aerodynamic efficiency."

What we can take from all that is, with their new cars, McLaren will be looking to have a more Ferrari-like weight distribution and Ferrari will be targeting more McLaren- like mechanical characteristics. The Renault espionage case brought to light a few key details of McLaren's damper technology, specifically how it achieves what Renault's banned mass damper used to in terms of spreading out the load variations on the tyre. It was almost certainly this that Costa was referring to when he talked of how the McLaren's kerb performance was independent of the relative wheelbases of the two cars.

"There are concepts independent of the respective aero configurations that we believe gave them that advantage," he says when pressed. Take it that the Ferrari F2008 will have something similar on the damper front.

So with the concepts of the two cars converging towards each other, we might see more straight fights between them on any given weekend. More fights between them on the track and hopefully fewer off it.

Then there's the matter of the driver line-ups. At this moment, both teams appear to have the nicely balanced situation of a megastar in one car and an extremely good team-mate to keep him on his toes in the other. Last year - and at other times in its past - McLaren suffered through the imbalance and paranoia that inevitably unfolds when you put two absolute aces together in a car capable of winning the world championship. Last year it could be forgiven, for it had no way of knowing that Lewis Hamilton was going to be of that calibre in his rookie year.

But in the past McLaren has often fallen over itself trying for the ultimate, when history has shown surrendering theoretical perfection for a more workable balance usually works better, something that Ferrari worked out long ago with its Schumacher-centric team and its emphasis on workable, practical, adaptable racing cars. Ferrari mechanics always had an easier time changing components than their opposite numbers at McLaren - even if it did mean losing a few decimal points of aero performance. Last year McLaren accepted this for the first time in the configuration of its car. This year it seems to have accepted it in its driver choice, too.

There was a historical exception that proves this rule, of course: that of McLaren's 1988 season when, with the superteam of Ayrton Senna/Alain Prost and a very technically ambitious car, McLaren enjoyed a season of total domination. Ever since then, until last year, you get the sense McLaren has been striving to repeat that, using the same no-compromise approach. This was Ron Dennis the perfectionist perfectly reflected in his team.

But the competition's too good now. Back in '88 the only team with comparable technical savvy was Williams - and it was saddled with an uncompetitive Judd V8 customer engine. Ferrari, Benetton, Lotus and the rest were all technically inferior. The probable reality is that McLaren's '88 domination came despite the intensity of its search for perfection rather than because of it.

It's taken almost two decades of striving amid ever- intensifying competition to make that clear. Last year it finally abandoned that approach - and came up with the first bulletproof McLaren in decades. Again, don't just take my word for it. Here's Whitmarsh again: "In the past we've been very poor at risk benefit analysis. We've always put more emphasis on the benefits of performance than on the attendant risk. We have given ourselves excessively demanding timeframes and performance targets, and typically marginal cooling packages.

"Go back a few years as an example. On the morning of the Australian GP one year we managed to pull the inside of our garage out as we left to go to the grid. An umbilical was still connected to the car. But if you surveyed the wreckage what you saw were people who were just burned out because the car was late, had too much risk incorporated, too much energy expended in the rectification of the issues arising from those risks. For a long time we've had cars with a good level of aero efficiency and other measurements of performance but we haven't had a rounded package. We took a step back from that with the 2007 car."

And it became more Ferrari-like as a result. Looked at in this light, the Ferrari blueprint as laid down by Todt/ Brawn/Byrne has finally won the ultimate accolade - in that the team that long represented the diametric opposite approach has now apparently fallen in with its philosophy. This season should see them closer still.