As Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc leave the pit lane of the Yas Marina circuit on Friday for the first practice session at the final grand prix of the season, it will be 90 years to the day since Enzo Ferrari registered the name of his new racing team with the local authorities in Modena, his home town. By putting his name to that document Ferrari set in motion an era of glory and glamour and tragedy and disappointment, creating an unfolding narrative characterised by an instinct for high drama.

The members of Scuderia Ferrari arrive in Abu Dhabi at the end of a year spent celebrating that anniversary. The idea was to end the season in triumph with the team’s first world championship for more than a decade. When Leclerc won the classic mid-season races at Spa and Monza, the Ferrari flags were flying again. But one mistake after another cost the team the chance to challenge their rivals, culminating in the absurd incident at Interlagos when Vettel’s brainless misjudgment caused a collision with Leclerc that put both cars out of the race with half a dozen laps to go.

Vettel has now spent five seasons at Ferrari without adding to the four world titles he won with Red Bull, just as Fernando Alonso, previously a double champion with Renault, did before him. A seat in one of the Scuderia’s cars has long been held to represent the pinnacle of any driver’s ambition: there was always talk that Ayrton Senna would eventually end up there and many still assume that Lewis Hamilton’s career will not be complete without it. But for all the potential rewards, including the experience of worship from the team’s worldwide army of fans, today’s generation of aspiring world champions would need to think very carefully about the wisdom of signing up.

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Enzo Ferrari had just about retired from the cockpit and had established himself as a regional dealer for Alfa Romeo’s sports cars when he planned his most momentous step in the closing weeks of 1929. Enlisting support for the idea of entering Alfas in major events, he knew that the funding for his project could not come solely from the rich young men who fancied themselves as racing drivers and would pay him to prepare and run their cars. In a move that would establish a template for future generations he secured backing from companies such as Shell, Pirelli and Alfa Romeo for whom racing victories could be used to promote their products.

There were many successes in the 1930s for the cars carrying the emblem of the black prancing horse on a yellow shield, most significantly Tazio Nuvolari’s heroic win over the seemingly unbeatable state-sponsored German teams on their home ground at the Nürburgring in 1935. By the outbreak of war in 1939 he was already planning to build cars carrying his own name.

That had to wait until the end of the hostilities, during which Ferrari turned himself into a manufacturer of machine tools and established a new headquarters in a nearby town called Maranello. In 1947 the first Ferrari appeared and led on its debut before retiring in what Enzo described as “a promising failure”. Two weeks later it won its first victory on a circuit around the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. Victories in the Targa Florio, the Mille Miglia and Le Mans over the next two years preceded the launch of the Formula One team and a first victory in a championship round at Silverstone in 1951. Soon exiled Russian princes, Italian film stars and South American playboys were queueing up to buy the cars with the prancing horse badge. The horrible regularity with which men died at the wheel of Ferraris somehow only heightened the charisma.

Those days of slaughter are gone but the Scuderia’s historic penchant for a good crisis remains. In the 1950s and 1960s the team had to be saved first by the government-funded gift of the complete Lancia F1 team and then by a Fiat takeover. In the 1970s the prancing horse was on its knees again when Niki Lauda came to the rescue. Ferrari’s death in 1988 came in the middle of 20 years of failure that were ended by Michael Schumacher’s five titles in a row.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Enzo Ferrari poses with his Mille Miglia cars at Maranello in 1956, Juan Manuel Fangio’s to his immediate left. Photograph: Thomas D McAvoy/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

Mattia Binotto, the current team principal, is a gifted and well-liked technical director whose design team have produced an excellent car for this year’s series but whose deficiencies as a manager lie behind the overall failure. Vettel and Leclerc, at opposite ends of their careers, have one more season left on their contracts, a year Binotto can show whether he can keep them ahead of the opposition and out of each other’s way.

More serious is the question of survival in a changing world. Formula One’s use of supposedly eco-friendly hybrid power units is a life-support mechanism for the sport in its traditional guise, while the alternative offered by the all-electric Formula E, which kicked off its new season in Riyadh at the weekend, is hardly more exciting than a video game, despite attracting the participation of several major manufacturers. The Cars: Accelerating the Future exhibition, now on at the V&A in London, feels like an elegy for a 20th-century idea, while Aston Martin’s attempt to rescue the company’s fortunes by launching a petrol-powered SUV last week seems an irresponsible way of confronting the climate emergency.

So the real question – with implications going far beyond world titles – is not whether the Scuderia Ferrari will end its championship drought before its 100th birthday. It is whether, by that time, the curtains of history will have been drawn across the entire spectacle.