Insight: Can Ferrari win Monaco Grand Prix for the first time since 2001?

It may seem surprising for an F1 team so closely identified with the glamour of Monaco and its history, but Ferrari is winless on the iconic street track since 2001.

Sebastian Vettel has won the race, back in 2011 with Red Bull and he leads the drivers' world championship, ahead of two time Monaco winner Lewis Hamilton. Kimi Raikkonen and Jenson Button are the other two Monaco winners in the field this year, with Fernando Alonso absent on Indy 500 duty, where he will start Sunday's race from 5th on the grid.

Mercedes has won Monaco every year since 2013, but their longer wheelbase car and its problems this season with the ultrasoft tyres raise question marks and give Ferrari some cause for optimism. Another is the car's pace in the final sector of the lap in Barcelona, which is always a good indicator for Monaco. Although Hamilton pipped Vettel in qualifying, the Ferrari driver made a small mistake in the final sector; the pace was definitely there.

So why has Ferrari been unlucky at Monaco since the turn of the millennium?

Well pace, especially in qualifying is certainly a contributing factor. Since 2001 they have had only one pole position, which was Felipe Massa in 2008; a race he should have won, but Lewis Hamilton was able to make a pit stop at just the right moment, due to tapping the barrier and it swung the race his way.

The win has tended to go with pole at Monaco, although last year was a notable exception when Red Bull threw the race away for Daniel Ricciardo with a strategy error and then a pit stop mess-up. But Ricciardo has been on the podium twice in the last three years in Monaco.

The year before pole sitter Lewis Hamilton lost the race due to an unforced error by him and the team on an extra pit stop under the Safety Car.

Strategy wise, the race is a classic one stopper, with a long first stint of around 32 laps on ultrasofts and then a second stint on supersofts. The timing is everything as are the gaps you drop back into after a stop. It takes just under 20 seconds to pass through the pits, plus the time for a stop.

The Safety car is a huge factor; since 2012 there is a 100% record of Safety Car deployments. A stop under a safety car saves around 14 seconds compared to one at racing speeds.

The golden rule of race strategists when you have track position is “mirror the car behind”, in other words, you have track position, so don’t be the first one to make a move, mirror whatever move the ‘hunter’ makes and you should have him covered, barring a driving error.

It is a tough track for overtaking, but nevertheless there were 21 overtakes in last year's race, which is 21 more than we saw in the Russian Grand Prix this year!

Monaco GP in Numbers

The 64th Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix will actually be the 75th race at this prestigious circuit which ran its first race on April 14, 1929.

The oldest driver to start in F1 55 year-old Louis Chiron who finished sixth in the 1955 Monaco GP. He is is also the only Monaco native to have won a race at his home circuit.

Curiously, Chiron missed the first ever Monaco race as he had committed to race the Indianapolis 500 instead.

Back to the present, Ferrari has a 16 year drought in Monaco, and beyond that the Italian outfit has only won the race three times in the last 38 years.

16 years is the team's longest winless wait at any circuit and since then six other teams have won in Monaco: McLaren, Williams, Renault, Brawn, Red Bull and Mercedes.

Deja-vu strikes again however, as Michael Schumacher broke a winless streak at Monaco in 1997 – 16 years after Gilles Villeneuve's 1981 victory.

Nothing sets a driver up better for victory than track position here as in the 63 previous Monaco F1 races, the winner has started from the top three on the grid on 53 occasions.

Oliver Panis broke that trend by winning from 14th in 1996, but since then a driver's only bet for a win has been to qualify third or better.

Lewis Hamilton is going for a third Monaco GP win – equalling fellow British drivers Sir Stirling Moss and Sir Jackie Stewart – but still two behind Graham Hill, who has five victories.

2016 champion Nico Rosberg had three wins here also, and at this point in the season Hamilton has 41 more drivers' championship points than he did last season. New team-mate Valtteri Bottas has never scored a point at Monaco.

Hamilton has never recorded a DNF here and hasn't qualified lower than third since 2011. A pole here will see him equal Senna's 65 career poles – three behind Schumacher's record.

The race has been won by a polesitter 28 times, Senna having qualified on pole five times with six victories – more poles and wins than any other driver at Monaco.

Red Bull's Max Verstappen has looked very fast, but has crashed out of his two previous Monaco starts and has never finished a race here.

Sebastian Vettel leads the drivers' championship by six points and is seeking a 45th career win at a circuit he hasn't led a lap on since 2012.

Ferrari's Finn Kimi Raikkonen hasn't outqualified a Ferrari team-mate since rejoining in 2014 and in 2017, Jolyon Palmer, Lance Stroll and Stoffel Vandoorne have also failed to outqualify their team-mates.

Raikkonen's last top-five finish here came in 2009, when he finished third. His 257th start this weekend will move him up to fifth in the all-time list.

Force India, the only team where both drivers have scored points in every race this season is just 19 points behind Red Bull in the championship, 39 more points at this stage than last season which was its best ever. Sergio Perez finished third here in 2016.

Rival Williams are struggling as rookie Lance Stroll has no points and veteran Felipe Massa has half the points (18) he had at this stage in 2016. Massa hasn't qualified in the top 10 in Monaco since 2010 and has only outqualified a team-mate once in the last seven Monaco GPs.

Returnee Jenson Button will make his 306th start, standing in for Alonso. This will put Button level with Schumacher, as the second most experienced F1 driver of all-time. Button has scored points at Monaco in all of the last four races. His team-mate Vandoorne is last in the championship.

Both are driving for a last-place McLaren team which hasn't finished at the back for the constructors' championship in its 51-year history. However, McLaren has 15 wins and 11 poles, the most of any team in the history of the Monaco GP.

This should be McLaren's best chance of points until Singapore in September (unless they get a miraculous engine upgrade in the meantime).