Luck is blind, but bad luck sees well: the difficult relationship between Ferrari and bad luck
- Marco Bise
- Mar 14, 2024
- 4 min read
Saturday 2nd March 2024. It is the day long awaited by fans all over the world: finally, it’s back on track for the first races of the season, and not for one or two, but four different categories: F1, F2, F3 and WEC.
A long-awaited weekend, but soon, for Ferrari fans will turn into the culmination of the sporting misfortune that seems to have enveloped Maranello since 2008, when Massa lost the world championship at the last corner of the last lap of the last race.
Bad luck that seems to haunt any driver who sets foot in the historic Maranello stable.
And this weekend it went down hard, hitting any red 4-wheeled object: from Charles Leclerc to the promising Dino Beganovic and Ollie Bearman, members of the FDA, from the future driver Lewis Hamilton to the two hypercars racing in the endurance world.
But let’s take a step back and look back over the weekend.
Ready to go and already problems
Some signs of what would have happened come already from the free practice of F2: we immediately notice how the two Prema - team in which Bearman runs – struggle a lot on the Sakhir track due to big setup problems. Problems that were thought to be solved in view of qualifying... but it will not be so: the Englishman will only be able to bring home the nineteenth place on the grid, then turned eighteenth for the disqualification of Maini.
Weekend uphill for the young English talent.
In the sprint on Friday, then, both Bearman and his teammate Antonelli will remain outside the points.
Why are we talking about bad luck? Just look at the recent results of Prema, which has been a benchmark for the category for years.
You will therefore understand that seeing a team of this caliber transform into the "curbstone" on duty is certainly unique.
Beganovic with an extra gear
That’s how you get to Saturday.
The first race scheduled is the F3 feature race.
Beganovic, poleman of the day, comes from a bad mistake during the sprint race that made him fall back to 29th. He lines up on the grid determined to make up for it; but his gearbox doesn’t agree: the first gear gets stuck until turn 2 and the young Swedish driver is sent to the back of the grid.
Forced to recover, he will finish P13, also getting the fastest lap. Would he have won? No one can know for sure, but surely, he would have fought for the top positions, given the monstrous pace he maintained throughout the race.
F2, the script doesn’t change.
Archived the F3 feature race, it’s time for F2. And of course, history repeats itself: Bearman and Antonelli remain stuck in the back for the usual setup problems. But of course, in this weekend of cosmic misfortune, this is not enough: everything that can go wrong must absolutely go wrong. And in fact, after a contact while overtaking Cordeel, Bearman loses a piece of his front wing in full straight, further worsening the situation of his Prema. At the end the Englishman managed to finish the race, although in fifteenth position, while Antonelli snatched a point that tastes miraculous, considering how things were going.
Trouble on trouble
We now move on to F1, the most awaited category.
All the eyes of the fans are on the track. And here, too, the bad luck seems to knock once again at the door of Maranello. From the first laps, Leclerc complains about a really strange feeling with his single-seater, which has become totally undrivable during braking. The reason? A temperature imbalance of the front brakes, of over 100 degrees reported on radio by Xavi Marcos, the Monegasque’s track engineer. This prevents Charles from battling with his teammate Carlos Sainz (also suffering trouble on the brakes) and Sergio Perez for the second position.
According to some simulations, without the brakes issue Leclerc could have reached the Mexican and finished behind the unattainable Max Verstappen, but bad luck decided otherwise.
But it doesn’t stop there: even the future Ferrari driver Lewis Hamilton, current Mercedes driver, was hit by the unexpected. During the race, in fact, he reports via radio that his seat’s broken, which prevents him from having an ideal feeling with the car. Something that has never happened before, at least from what we can remember, but obviously once you set foot in Maranello everything becomes possible.
In Losail between crazy BOP and magical transformations
And while in Bahrain we are witnessing this "massacre", in Losail, the scene of the first WEC race, the covered-wheeled red cars are not doing any better, indeed.
The first low blow is inflicted by the BoP, which seems to reward the LMDh at the expense of the poor LMH - all except Peugeot, which thanks to the best weight-power ratio of the lot and the lower minimum speed of activation of the all-wheel drive, seems to fly on the Qatari circuit.
To give an idea of how absurd this BoP was, just think that Isotta Fraschini - at her debut in the category - was given 55 kg of ballast, in a track where weight has a huge impact on performance. A brilliant idea, which obviously sent the Italian hypercar to the back of the grid.
Could this be the umpteenth proof that perhaps it would be better to update the BoP criteria? Maybe based on something more reliable and realistic than wind tunnel simulations? It is not for us to determine, but we have now lost count of the embarrassments of the federation on this front.
Despite these external obstacles, the #50 Ferrari immediately takes the lead thanks to a great maneuver by Miguel Molina, who, however, undoes everything by making a mistake at the first pit stop that costs him a stop & go penalty.
But could it end here? Absolutely not: the misfortune still has one last target, the twin car #51: involved in a light and harmless contact with a GT3 during a dubbing, the red LMH of AF Corse decided to change identity and magically turn into a Peugeot 9X8, losing the entire rear in the process.
Really surreal scenes, that seem to confirm a very particular "aphorism" but that sums up this weekend perfectly:
"Luck is blind, but bad luck sees us".
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