René Arnoux says Ferrari must win in 2022: "You can't finish third and be happy"

Two years without victories: Scuderia Ferrari, after competing with Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton for the world title in the 2017 and 2018 season thanks to Sebastian Vettel as first driver and with Kimi Raikkonen as a strong second driver, went through important changes at the top management level in 2019, with the technical director Mattia Binotto who also covered the position of team principal succeeding Maurizio Arrivabene at the helm of the Maranello team.

At the same time, in 2019 Charles Leclerc made his debut at the wheel of a Ferrari, a driver born in 1997 who grew up in the Ferrari Driver Academy under the watchful eyes of Massimo Rivola. The SF90 car in 2019 posted three consecutive victories after the summer break, with Charles Leclerc winning at Spa and Monza, while Sebastian Vettel won the Singapore Grand Prix. The German driver’s victory in Marina Bay remains the latest celebrated by Scuderia Ferrari in Formula 1 up to date. After the confidential agreement signed with the FIA and made official at the beginning of 2020, for Ferrari following campaign was much more difficult due to the performance of its power unit which was drastically reduced, finishing only in sixth place in the Constructors’ standings.

In 2021 we were able to see a partial improvement, with the Italian side returning to fighting for podiums on several occasions and finishing P3 in the Formula 1 Constructor Standings, behind Mercedes and Red Bull, but still without being able to score a race win. The same cannot be said about other teams like Alpine or McLaren, who overall were not as strong as Ferrari, but were able to win in Hungary and Monza (where McLaren actually took the only one-two finish of any team in the 2021 Formula One season).

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René Arnoux, who in the past defended the colors of Ferrari from 1983 to 1985 – the year in which he only competed in the inaugural Brazilian Grand Prix at the wheel of the Ferrari 156/85 – by winning the 1983 Constructors’ Championship together with Patrick Tambay, believes that the results seen in 2021 are in any case not worthy of the history of Ferrari: “Last year was bad, it was not a season worthy of the best team in the world. Jean Todt hated finishing second, he was ashamed, I wanted to race with him, I would have won a World Championship. You can’t finish third and be happy, you can’t be one second slower per lap ”, he said in a recent interview for La Gazzetta dello Sport.

However, René Arnoux points out that Ferrari has all the tools at its disposal to win. In 2022 the Frenchman hopes for a little more courage from the managers of the Maranello team, to challenge Mercedes and Red Bull: “To say that Ferrari will be competitive only because the regulation changes makes no sense. For three years there has been something wrong; the money is there, the team is a beauty, the competence in the factory is there, but without the right people who run things, things don’t work. If you don’t change at the top I don’t see how you can hope that the results will change. We have to be able to fight with Verstappen and Hamilton.” – former Scuderia Ferrari driver René Arnoux concluded.