Inside the madcap world of floundering Ferrari: How relentless backstabbing behind the scenes is sabotaging the Scuderia - with their chairman's hypocritical barbs at Lewis Hamilton the latest self-inflicted wound

Ferrari president John Elkann has told his drivers – Lewis Hamilton in particular, it would appear – to keep quiet and get on with their jobs.

Well, welcome to reality, Mr Ferrari supremo. And, first thing to observe, it’s a little rich of you to take a pop at Hamilton now, given who courted him and brokered the £60million-a-year deal to facilitate his dream move to Maranello.

It was you, Mr Elkann.

Practically every half-shrewd observer with eyes to see knew that Lewis was a driver in danger of being a superannuated great, past his best for certain and heading, in a brutal assessment, into perhaps a fifth season of barely discernible but incremental decline, as he well might be aged 40.

Hamilton’s signing was a vanity project conjoining the world’s most famous team and most famous driver. It might have worked brilliantly, but 10 years ago.

And telling his drivers to button it, as Elkann did in remarks in Rome on Monday, is an ironic demand given that the very attraction to him in ‘Brand Hamilton’ was his public image, the projecting of Hamilton mania on social media as the most ardently marketed driver in the sport’s history.

So let’s dissect a few of the remarks Elkann made following the failure of either Hamilton, through a mistake of his own, driving into the back of Alpine’s Franco Colapinto, or Charles Leclerc in an accident for which he was blameless, to finish Sunday’s Brazilian Grand Prix.

Hailing his engineers and mechanics, he turned on his drivers, and one sensed Hamilton in particular, saying: ‘It’s important that the drivers we have focus on driving and talk less, because we still have important races ahead of us and it’s not impossible to get second place (in the constructors’ championship).’

Ferrari are 36 points behind Mercedes and four off Red Bull with three rounds remaining and 166 points available.

Elkann, 49, is a scion of the Agnelli dynasty, Italy’s richest family since the Second World War. He is the favoured grandson of Gianni Agnelli, the legend who built Fiat into the country’s prime business (4.4 per cent of the country’s GDP), but he is not believed to have any affinity for, or deep understanding of, motor racing.

Hence, as a plausible theory runs, why he was so bedazzled by Hamilton’s fame and global appeal rather than viewing his employment in terms of sporting logic. Better judges could see what was coming, but even those reservations did not extend to how off the pace Hamilton has been in his first year of a multi-year deal with the Scuderia.

Nor is it helpful to Ferrari’s cause that Elkann is currently serving a year’s community service in a settlement reached in September over a dispute over inheritance tax.

He and his siblings Lapo and Ginevra were ordered to pay £159million to Italian tax authorities, which their lawyers claimed did not include an admission of liability in an affair linked to the estate of his grandmother – Gianni’s wife – Marella Caracciolo, who died in 2019. So Elkann, if reports in Italy are correct, could be forced to help out at centres for the elderly (those older than his star British driver!) or assisting those with drug addiction.

A fish rots from the head down. That is a reason why it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for Hamilton, however terminal his decline in form. Ferrari, with their backstabbing addiction, are like no team he has experienced before.

More so, because he does not speak the language or understand Ferrari’s rhythms. Nor can he rise above the fissures through the sheer wonder of his driving as he once could.

Luca di Montezemolo, the most significant figure at the team since founder Enzo Ferrari himself, as team manager in 1970s and later as president, spoke earlier in the year of a lack of leadership – a criticism of Elkann (though there is personal animosity in this, for Elkann did not stand by Montezemolo as Maranello machinations plotted to unseat him).

Regular changes of team principal are a token of the constant turmoil at there.

Since Stefano Domenicali, now F1 chief executive, led Ferrari to the last of their world titles in 2008, the team principals have been: Marco Mattiacci, who amused the paddock by always wearing dark sunglasses no matter the grey skies. He lasted from April to November 2014.

Then, Maurizio Arrivabene, a Philip Morris cigarette executive (a cigarette salesman, as his critics had it) from 2015 to 2018; then the talented engineer, and, up until his firing, a Ferrari lifer, Mattia Binotto, who was given the dreaded chairman’s vote of confidence as Elkann sharpened the knife he plunged into his back, ending a tenure that ran from 2019 to 2022, despite some productive groundwork.

Now Fred Vasseur, an avuncular Frenchman, struggling in the volatile environment, oversees the team.

Hamilton has backed the under-pressure Vasseur, for whose ART team he won the GP2 championship with almost unbelievable elan on his way to a Formula One seat at his long-term sponsors McLaren.

Hamilton and Vasseur’s fate are inextricably entwined and it is hard to compute that Vasseur (who, also, importantly, has not learned Italian; easy enough for a French speaker after a few months of application) would survive an early defenestration of Hamilton. They may not go out of the factory as a job lot, but within weeks or months of each other, surely?

Enough talk of Elkann. What next for Hamilton, who talked on Sunday of his Ferrari experience as being a ‘nightmare’ – part self-flagellation after his dispiriting experience in Sao Paulo, but part exasperation of the wider context of Ferrari’s madcappery?

He hopes that next year’s regulation change will suit his driving style better. He does not want to quit while behind. But he has not notched a podium in Ferrari’s win-free season, and is 66 points shy of Leclerc’s haul.

Hamilton, the one-time unassailable GOAT, 41 in January, found the wrong time to move to the maverick team. Time will tell, but a happy resolution is unlikely.