As expected, following the retirement of seven times World Champion Michael Schumacher the Ferrari team which was effectively built around him over the last ten years has started to come apart.

It was been confirmed that team principal Jean Todt has been promoted to CEO of the whole Ferrari operation while technical director Ross Brawn will be leaving along with engine guru Paolo Martinelli, who will be moving up to parent company FIAT. These follow the announcemnt last week that race engineer Nigel Stepney will be taking a year’s sabbatical.

So what does this mean for the championship hopes of recent Ferrari recruit Kimi Raikkonen who must have thought he was stepping into an established world championship winning team? Effectively they will now be starting from scratch, and I doubt that “The Iceman” has the character or temprament to build a winning team around him.

Roll on 2007. The new season looks like it could be the most open in nearly a decade.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Formula One. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.