Ferrari’s F1 title drought is about to reach 18 years, with Mercedes closing in on both world championships.

Kimi Antonelli only needs to finish ninth at the Mexico City Grand Prix this weekend to be crowned champion, and Mercedes also have their first chance to seal constructors’ glory. They are currently 133 points ahead of Ferrari.

Kimi Raikkonen was Ferrari’s last drivers’ champion in 2007, though they did win the teams’ title the following year.

Sebastian Vettel: I didn’t win a title because Ferrari were ‘hesitant’ to change

During the drought, three different Ferrari drivers have finished runner-up in the standings: Fernando Alonso (2010, 2012), Sebastian Vettel (2017, 2018) and Charles Leclerc (2022).

Alonso lost out to Vettel by a combined margin of seven points in two title races that went to the wire. They later recruited the German driver in 2015 as they sought to bring down the dominant Mercedes team.

Ferrari last won the F1 title in 2007 with Kimi Raikkonen 🏆 Why have the Scuderia gone 19 years without another title? And when will their next title arrive?

Vettel led the 2017 championship after 12 out of 20 races but fell away down the stretch and ultimately finished 46 points adrift of Lewis Hamilton.

It was a similar story the following year: the two drivers were virtually neck-and-neck at the halfway mark, only for Vettel and Ferrari to collapse. The final margin was 88 points.

Speaking in the ‘Being Sebastian Vettel’ documentary, via F1 Insider, he said: “Under the pressure and with those expectations, the fear of failure was simply so great.”

He then added: “I believe the missed opportunity was that we as an organisation were too hesitant and too timid.”

There are striking parallels with comments made by Hamilton at the 2025 Belgian GP, when he explained that Ferrari were overly resistant to change.

“It’s a huge organisation, and there are a lot of moving parts,” he said. “And not all of them are firing on all the cylinders that they need to be. That’s ultimately why the team has not had the success that I think it deserves.

“[…] If you look at the team over the last 20 years, they’ve had amazing drivers: Kimi, Fernando, Sebastian – all world champions. However, they didn’t win a world championship.

He added: “I think if you take the same path all the time, you get the same results.”

Hamilton repeated that last phrase almost verbatim following the Italian Grand Prix last month.

He said, via F1’s official website: “We’ve got to look at just how we communicate, because if we continue to travel the same path, we get the same result. And it’s like, we keep getting the same result.

“We’ve got to change things, because this is not helping us to move forward.”

Clearly, Vettel and Hamilton, two of the most accomplished drivers ever to represent Ferrari, have identified the same problem. They are set in their ways, even though those ways have been failing them for the best part of two decades.

Until the ‘hesitant and timid’ culture changes at Maranello, which will naturally take time, they can expect the barren run to continue.