Ferrari will learn from 2017's 'painful lessons' - Marchionne

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Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne has promised that Ferrari will learn from what went wrong in 2017 and come back stronger in 2018.

The team had a dream start to this year's world championship, but then struggled to keep up the momentum over the summer. That allowed Lewis Hamilton to reel in Sebastian Vettel. Once ahead he was able to pull away and clinch the title last week in Mexico.

"We have done well given our starting point," Marchionne told a Ferrari investors conference call this week.

"If I had asked anybody at this time last year as to how well we would have done in 2017, I couldn't have got a buyer for the idea that we would be that far advanced in the first half of the season.

"The car is there – it is in my view the best car on the track today," he insisted. "[However,] we were unable to finish the task.

"The second half revealed some structural weaknesses in the manner in which we are managing the business," he admitted. "[They] are going to get rectified, and hopefully in 2018 will be a much better season."

Ferrari's Marchionne threatens to pull out of F1!

Marchionne has sent shockwaves through the sport this week with his threat to quit F1 over the proposed engine reforms proposed by Liberty for 2021.

But there was no mention of that in his comments on Friday, which were focussed on next year's campaign.

He resisted taking the easy line of simply blaming ill fortune, and said that the team had to look deep within itself for answers.

"I don't believe in bad luck. Ultimately it is a reflection on the way in which we manage the businesses.

"It was a combination, especially in the second half of the season, between technical issues and driver error," he said. "Or driver misjudgement."

"I think we have learned a lot, and I think it is a painful way of learning it," he admitted.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.