Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo has called Ferrari’s 2011 season a ‘difficult’ one, which has seen the team win just a single grand prix.
The Italian outfit have finished third in the constructors’ championship for a second time in a row, whilst Fernando Alonso looks likely to finish third in the drivers’, a place worse than 2010. Meanwhile, Felipe Massa has struggled for pace and hasn’t finished on the podium since the 2010 Korean GP.
Montezemolo blames the poor form on the efforts they put into fighting for the title until the very last race a year ago, but stopped short of writing the season off completely, hailing their single win at Silverstone, 60 years since their first, as a great source of satisfaction.
“It’s been a difficult year on the Formula 1 front, where maybe we paid for our great fightback in 2010, but above all, we did not have the car that I, the team and all our fans wanted,” he said speaking in Mugello.
“Nevertheless, we can still delight in our Silverstone result, winning with Fernando Alonso, sixty years on from when, at the same circuit, Froilan Gonzalez took our first ever victory at the highest level of motorsport. That is cause for satisfaction.
“We can also take pride in the fact that, from 1997 to the present day, with very few exceptions, Ferrari has been a championship contender, either winning or fighting for the title to the very last round, in a period of time during which our main rivals, be it the Williams era, then McLaren, Renault and now Red Bull, have always changed.”
