In the first of ESPN's awards for the 2017 Formula One season, we review the team which turned in the most genuinely eye-opening performance of the year.
It's strange to write it now, but at the end of 2016 Ferrari was perceived to be in crisis. For a team with the richest history in F1 and one of the biggest budgets, winning just three races in three seasons (and none in 2016) was not good enough. Improvements in performance in 2015 were not sufficiently built on over the winter and Ferrari slipped behind Red Bull in the constructors' championship by the end of 2016. Lead driver Sebastian Vettel was in talks with Mercedes and technical director James Allison had already left the team for the reigning champions over the summer.
For once, expectations ahead of the launch of the new Ferrari were low. Under the new aerodynamic regulations, Red Bull was expected to emerge as the team to challenge Mercedes and Ferrari was supposed to be content with simply remaining in touch. But when the covers came off, it was clear that the SF70H was something special.
A unique treatment of the bodywork ahead of the sidepods -- a key area under the new regulations -- immediately caught the eye and when the car hit the track in testing it forced Ferrari's critics to reevaluate their low expectations. By the end of the two weeks in Barcelona, Ferrari's new car not only looked quick, it looked like a championship contender.
Vettel finished in the top two in all of the first six races, and that spell was only broken when his front wing was clipped in a first corner skirmish with Max Verstappen in Canada. Unlike Mercedes' new car, which had higher peaks but much lower troughs in the opening races, Ferrari's performance was less susceptible to the narrow operating window of Pirelli's softest compounds, and that gave Vettel a healthy lead in the standings.
However, Vettel's campaign first faltered with a moment of madness in Baku. In a race that almost anyone could have won, Vettel threw away his chance by deliberately driving into Lewis Hamilton behind the Safety Car. He was lucky to escape with a ten-second stop-go penalty, but given Hamilton's problems with a loose head rest later in the race, he could have won.
The slump continued with a second-place finish to Valtteri Bottas in Austria (mainly thanks to the Finn's lightning reflexes off the line) and a tyre failure in Silverstone, but Vettel hit back with victory in Budapest. Heading into the summer break it was all to play for.
At this stage Ferrari's transformation was clear to see. Fears car development would stutter down the stretch-- as it had done every year since 2010 -- failed to emerge and on arrival in Spa-Francorchamps news broke that Vettel had signed another three-year deal with Maranello. The signing, while not a surprise at the time, showed how far the team had come as Vettel's flirtation with Mercedes at the start of the year was stopped in its tracks by the sheer performance of the SF70H.
Belgium and Italy were always expected to be 'Mercedes tracks', so it wasn't a huge drama that Lewis Hamilton wrested the lead of the championship from Vettel as the second half of the season got underway. What mattered were the next the next three races in Singapore, Malaysia in Japan -- three races that suited the characteristics of the SF70H. And it's at this point that the Ferrari of recent years made an unwelcome return.
Vettel's collision with Verstappen and teammate Kimi Raikkonen at the start of the Singapore Grand Prix threw away at least 18 points (assuming Verstappen may have been able to beat Vettel if he had beaten him through Turn 1). A leak in the inlet manifold between the compressor and the cylinder heads during qualifying in Malaysia resulted in a back-of-the-grid starting position and a fourth place on a track where Ferrari clearly had the pace to win. Then came Japan and a missfire on the way to the grid that was traced to a faulty but deeply buried spark plug. It was the second DNF in three races and with it Vettel's realistic chances of winning the title had gone.
But those three races should not overshadow a remarkable season. The sustained performance throughout the year was a genuine surprise after the failures and upheaval of 2016, and for the first time since 2008 Ferrari arguably had the best car on the grid. The scale of that achievement was not lost on Vettel as he reflected on his season at the last round in Abu Dhabi.
"The step that we have done this year was incredible," he said. "The way the team has come out with a competitive car at the beginning, the way we have improved both chassis and engine, on all fronts I think it has been outstanding.
"We have been close for most of the year, not close enough when it mattered, but that's what happened. From that we made our conclusions, we learned our lessons. So I believe that those will help us next year. We are completely fired up."
Depending on your point of view, you can judge Ferrari's year as a success or a failure. But based on the context of the seasons that went before, it was the biggest step in performance of any of the teams on the grid. Expectations are now back where they should be at Maranello, and next year only a title will do.