Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but hot and spicy is tastier for Ferrari Formula One team principal Maurizio Arrivabene.
Sebastian Vettel’s stirring victory in Hungary, the land of paprika, on Sunday gave Arriva-bene the chance he had been waiting for.
Mercedes had won eight of the nine previous races and their non-executive chairman Niki Lauda had stirred things up when he blamed Ferrari rather than his team’s dominance for making the sport seem boring.
“How is it Mercedes’ fault if Ferrari mucks about with spaghetti rather than improve their car on the track?” the Austrian, a former Ferrari world champion, had said.
Ferrari were not going to let a barb like that slip by unpunished and Arrivabene tucked in with glee on Sunday afternoon.
“It’s the second victory after 10 races and eight podiums and I dedicate it to those who don’t know how to add up, who say stupid things,” he told reporters.
“I don’t like spaghetti, I had a spicy pizza made and told the team to fill up.”
Sunday’s crazy race was Vettel’s second win of the season, after Malaysia, and the German dedicated it to former Ferrari test driver Jules Bianchi, the Frenchman whose funeral he attended last week.
Bianchi died of head injuries nine months after his Marussia skidded off the track and into a recovery tractor at the Japanese Grand Prix.
Hungary was a fitting tribute to the popular 25-year-old, seen as a future Ferrari winner, and also the ideal antidote to those who moaned about predictable racing and boredom.
By his own reckoning, it also left Arrivabene just two steps away from heaven.
Before the start of the season, after a winless 2014, the Ferrari boss had set out his targets for the year ahead by declaring that two wins would be a success, three a triumph and “if we win four we go to heaven”.
Success is now assured and Arrivabene could not resist another little dig.
“People were talking about us as a disaster. Most probably they did not read a number or they don’t want to read the number,” he said.
“Mercedes is strong everywhere,” he added.
“We expect to have good races, bad races. The direction that we took is good. We have nine races to go. We will have races like this one, and others maybe like Silverstone and Spain.”
Renault step up
Under-fire Renault, their Formula One future still uncertain, expect a stronger second half of the season after powering three of the top four cars in the Hungarian Grand Prix.
“Not only has our reliability improved and taken us to the end of the race, but our performance has also stepped up so that we are able to fight at the front,” said operations director Remi Taffin yesterday.
“We know we still have a lot of work to do, but this strong result before the summer break is a real achievement,” added the Frenchman.
“We know where we are going and realise that there is still some more progress to be made in order to achieve these results on a regular basis.
“But, for the second part of the season, we look forward to showing off the progress we have made so far.”