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Wait - what? Marco Mattiacci is on the job just seven months, replacing long-time Ferrari team principal Stephano Domenicale. He barely knows the names of his drivers, much less those of the wrenches who fettle the cars. Starting from scratch, with a number of top-level team members being sacked after years of laughably dismal performance, it is his job to get the team back onto the top step of the F1 podium, which for a variety of very good reasons, will not be remotely possible until next year (which of course starts tomorrow, but that's another story).


So today was the last race of the season. The geniuses at Ferrari inform us that now Mattiacci, having barely dampened his toes in these treacherous waters, is outta there, to be replaced by a chap called Maurizio Arrivabene, whomeverthehell he is. Now it is his job to get the team back to the top step of the podium, etc., etc. Furthermore, it is his job to do so without the great Fernando Alonzo, who can and will drive the ass off of anything you care to put him into. Nando is moving on, having driven steaming piles of Ferrari for the last five years, making them look reasonably good in spite of them being the almost undriveable heaps of slag they were. He is being replaced by four-time world champion Sebastien Vettel, who won his races in a totally dominant car and who couldn't win a bingo game in this year's less competitive car.

I have thought for awhile that this whole deal would become an Italian comic opera. Was I wrong? I mean, good god, what in the hell is in the water there in Maranello? I suspect that at McLaren's Woking headquarters, they are, as they say, rolling on the floor, laughing their asses off. Alonzo is, after all, going to drive a McLaren next year.