Ferrari has failed to score any points in the first two rounds of 2009, giving the team their worst start to an F1 season in 17 years. The reigning World Champions are in all sorts of trouble and Stefano Domenicali has been forced to admit their performance has been unacceptable.

Most concerning is that Ferrari’s lacklustre showing is not the result of any one person or process.

They have had an unusually poor offseason and have built a car that is unable to fight for race wins. Not only that, but the F60 is unreliable, their two drivers are making mistakes, and some of their strategic calls have bordered on ridiculous.

It almost looks like Ferrari has reverted back to being the stereotypical Italian organisation of yesteryear where passion gets in the way of common sense.

The team’s Malaysian Grand Prix weekend was nothing short of a farce and their efforts were ruined by a series of strategic blunders. Both Raikkonen and Massa were let down by people at Ferrari who should have known better.

Felipe Massa was the first to fall victim to a monumental error of judgement.

The Brazilian set a qualifying time early in Q1 and found himself in the top half of the field. It was a scrappy run from Massa who made a mistake on his first lap, but Ferrari figured it was good enough to get him through into Q2 and didn’t send him out again.

Ferrari figured wrongly.

Massa’s time was not good enough and he was eliminated from qualifying in 16th position. Getting past Q1 should be something of a simple procedure for Ferrari, but they turned it into a challenge, and then failed to overcome it.

The worst thing about Ferrari’s tactical blunder is that they had time to fix it but unbelievably chose not to.

With three minutes to go in the session, laptimes were rapidly falling and that should have been Ferrari’s cue to send Massa out on a final run. However the team failed react at all. Massa said afterwards that “when I started to drop it was impossible to go out again because there was no time to do another lap” but in reality, his engineers were simply not in touch with the action unfolding around them. They may have been confident early on that Massa’s time would keep him safe, but it should have been clear when their rivals started lapping competitively on the softer tyres that another run was required.

If punters around the world watching the TV at home could tell that Massa had to complete another lap, surely someone on the Scuderia pitwall should have come to the same conclusion.

As a result of Ferrari’s carelessness, Felipe lined up near the back of the grid and could only manage ninth in the race.

At least he knows the team aren’t giving preferential treatment to Kimi Raikkonen.

The 2007 World Champion was subjected to one of the most embarrassing strategic blunders in years at Sepang. On a bone-dry circuit in the bright sunshine, Ferrari put wet weather tyres on Raikkonen’s Ferrari.

Incredible.

There are a number of reasons why Ferrari’s decision was pure madness.

The first of those reasons is the most obvious. The track was dry and the tyres were designed for wet conditions. It was only going to work if the heavens opened right there and then, but that never looked like happening.

Formula One cars do not work very well on the wrong tyres so there is little to gain by gambling on the rain before it starts to fall. The wet tyres that Raikkonen fitted left him 20 seconds per lap off the pace, so even if it did start to shower right away it would almost have been quicker for Kimi to stay on slicks and make another pitstop at the end of his outlap.

Both Brawn drivers stopped for fuel in the laps after Raikkonen’s pitstop and both put dry tyres on their cars. It was the only sensible option, and it is exactly what Ferrari should have done as well, especially since it wasn’t even cloudy when Kimi pitted. His car was casting a shadow!

The second reason that Raikkonen’s pitstop was laughable is that Ferrari put extreme wets on his car. That was insanity. If the team was going to take such a crazy gamble on the rain, they should have at least used intermediate wet tyres that would have lasted longer in the dry whilst still providing some sort of grip in the wet. Instead, Ferrari opted for the extreme wets, which weren’t the best tyres to have in the rain anyway!

The extreme wets start cooking after just one lap in the dry so if it didn’t rain within a minute of Kimi pitting (not likely given the bright sunshine) he was going to boil his rubber and it would be useless when it did rain anyway. Intermediates would at least have given Kimi more performance in the dry and they would have lasted longer until the rain came.

The final reason that Ferrari’s gamble was ludicrous is that it was totally unnecessary. Kimi was running fifth at the time and had a very good chance at a podium. Given what happened later on he might even have landed the win. With rain and Safety Cars on the horizon there were more and better opportunities ahead for Ferrari to make up ground, and they should have seen that coming. They simply didn’t need to take the risk so early. Raikkonen was ahead of Glock and Heidfeld before his pitstop, and with a bit of luck could have finished there also.

Ferrari took a gamble they didn’t need to take, at a time when it was never going to work, on tyres that were never going to help.

Luca Di Montezemolo must have gone close to breaking another TV.

Along with the strategic blunders, Ferrari also experienced poor mechanical reliability in Malaysia.

Raikkonen suffered a KERS fire in practice and that led him to qualify with the system switched off. The Fin had to circulate with an extra 30kg of useless weight and his respectable starting position was only possible thanks to the grid penalties suffered by others.

Kimi’s F60 struck another KERS problem in the race and it was sent to the pits under the red flag with little chance of making it back out for a restart.

This was especially disappointing given that both Ferrari’s stopped during the Australian Grand Prix with mechanical gremlins.

It is the first time that Ferrari has failed to score a point in the first two races of a season since 1992. That was way back in the days of Jean Alesi, Ivan Capelli, and the atrocious F92A.

Alesi started his ‘92 campaign with a pair of engine failures at Kyalami and Mexico City. Teammate Capelli also had an engine failure in the first round, and ended his second race with a crash on lap one.

The season did not improve at all for Ferrari and their drivers registered a whopping 20 retirements between them. The car was horrendously unreliable and was so slow that it could be beaten by Maranello’s engine customers.

Ivan Capelli had a knack for throwing his machine into the gravel, or into the wall, or into the side of other cars, and did so without any great pace which meant he was sacked before the season finished. His replacement, Nicola Larini, fared little better.

Ferrari still managed fourth in the 1992 Constructors Championship but was 70 points behind Benetton in third. They were utterly thrashed and in the last three decades, only 1980 could be considered worse for the team.

Stefano Domenicali will be hoping there are no more similarities between that and 2009.

He isn’t the only one.