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Laurence Edmondson, F1 Editor
After his first year in charge at Ferrari, team principal Fred Vasseur believes many of the assumptions made about his team — including some of the ones he held before taking the job — are wide of the mark.
Vasseur became Ferrari team boss in January this year after the resignation of his predecessor Mattia Binotto at the end of an unsuccessful title campaign in 2022.
The 2023 season got off to a slow start when a reliability issue at the first race in Bahrain meant Charles Leclerc had a grid penalty by the second event in Saudi Arabia. Both cars then failed to score a point at the third round in Australia before Leclerc secured the team’s first podium of the year at the fourth round in Baku.
Over the final ten races of the season, Ferrari’s fortunes improved and it secured the second largest points haul in that period behind Red Bull as well as becoming the only team other than the word champions to win a race.
Speaking during an end-of-year press conference at the team’s factory in Maranello, Vasseur said the team’s ability to bounce back had impressed him.
“The main lesson is that everybody told me [before I arrived] that at Ferrari you will start the season very well and then it’s going downhill,” he said. “Trust me, after Jeddah or Melbourne, I said ‘What the f—, if this was the good part of the season we will be in big trouble!’.
“But the lesson is that we were able to react and the perception that you have from an external point of view of Ferrari is probably wrong.
“When I was outside I was always thinking that the team will overreact to every single event, but the team was very, very calm after Melbourne. We were cautious of the situation and the weaknesses of the car but I think we had a good attitude to tackle it.
“We took it step-by-step and I think the reaction was a good one. I think it’s a good lesson that even when you are in trouble in our business you have to stay calm and to build up the pace step-by-step.”
Vasseur confirmed Ferrari’s 2024 car would be launched on Feb.13 next year and that there would be very little carryover from this year’s car.
“We have the same regulations now for three years in a row and you can’t change massively the situation,” Vasseur said. “It is a matter tenths of a second, so it’s 0.1 or 0.2 percent that we are looking for, it’s not five.
“For sure, we have to do a step and I don’t underestimate the step. We are changing 95 percent of the components of the car, so perhaps you can consider that a revolution, I don’t know if it will be. Now the expectation will be that we focus on ourselves, we are doing a good step forward, but at the end it is always a matter of comparison.
“You can improve by 100 but if the others are improving by 120, you look stupid, but if they are improving by 80, you will look like a hero. So far the most important is to continue to push, to develop and the drivers are in the middle of the project and they are fully in the development and I think that so far we are going in the right direction.
“I don’t know if the others will go more or less, but we will see [at the first race] in Bahrain.”
Vasseur said a big part of Ferrari’s improvement in the second half of the year came from the team fully supporting aggressive decisions that ultimately paid off.
“My job was to back them in the fact we have to be aggressive, we have to take risks and be ambitious, and to not be scared of any incident or something like this,” he said.
“You always have to be at the limit and I think that this culture is where Red Bull is very performant for me because they are used to being at the limit, used to being aggressive on every single topic and we have to take this direction, but I think we did a good step forward.”
Source: www.espn.com