Each driver in F1 is assigned a three letter code on timing and scoring; Alonso is “ALO”, Hamilton is “HAM” etc. So when Luca Badoer arrived in Valencia to replace the injured Felipe Massa (“MAS”), he was given the code “BAD”. Did they know something about his performance in advance?

The aging Italian tooled around the seaside circuit like he was taking a weekend cruise. He claimed he was “learning the circuit” and “treating the weekend as a test” as he set times 3 or so seconds off the pace. What a joke!

When Jaime Alguersuari made his debut for Toro Rosso the race before in Hungary (without any testing), he finished the first session 0.220s behind his teammate as he “learned the circuit”. Badoer was 2.2 seconds slower than his teammate in his first session and was 2.5 seconds slower than Raikkonen (plus 1.5 seconds slower than Alguersuari) in Q1!

Ferrari should be embarrassed by this farce. They obviously put all their eggs in one basket – the one marked “Michael Schumacher” – and when his comeback didn’t pan out they said, “Well now what?”

More than anything this brings to light the biggest problem with Ferrari – they have no driver development program whatsoever. How many years did McLaren back Lewis Hamilton before his F1 debut? The Red Bull program produced Sebastian Vettel and BMW’s gave us Robert Kubica. While most other teams nurture young talent, what does Ferrari have? Marc Gene (35), Luca Badoer (38) and Michael Schumacher (40) – average age about TWICE that of every other teams test driver.

So we go to Spa, with Badoer benefiting from the fact that since there is only 1 week between the European and Belgian GPs there really isn’t enough time to replace him. So look for “BAD” at the bottom of the timing and scoring once again and if you are a Ferrari fan, hope that that this is a big lesson learned.

– MCZF1