Fred Vasseur believes Ferrari overreacted to its problems during a tough run of races mid-season and that not doing so in future will be crucial to the outcome of the constructors’ championship.
Ferrari was just 24 points behind Red Bull in the constructors’ championship after Charles Leclerc’s victory in Monaco, but failed to score with both cars in Canada and picked up just 50 points across the following three rounds in Spain, Austria and Silverstone. With a car failing to score on two occasions in that spell, Vasseur says maximizing the points return from uncompetitive weekends will be crucial as Ferrari chases McLaren and Red Bull.
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“We had a first part of the season where Red Bull was flying, then we had a good sequence for us with two or three wins, and then it was McLaren and now it’s Mercedes – or Mercedes and McLaren – overall I think the four teams did a similar job,” Vasseur said. “It’s not quite often that after 12 or 13 races you can have four teams in a position to win the championship.
“I’m not a big fan of statistics but we scored something like 60% more points than one year ago after 12 or 13 races and the gap with Red Bull last year was [big] – we reduced the gap by something like 300% on Red Bull and I think it’s the interest part of the championship, going into Zandvoort…
“Honestly on Friday morning [in Spa] I would have bet on Max [Verstappen], even starting on P11, that he was flying, and then in the afternoon for me it was obvious that it would be McLaren. In the end, we took the pole and Mercedes won the race! It’s a good summary of the season and a good summary of the championship this year.
“I think the most difficult probably in this championship is not to do a one-two when you have the best car, it’s to score good points when you are not. It’s where we failed as a team in UK, Spain, Canada – this part of the season we struggled a little bit more and sometimes we overreacted as a team and we lost too many points at this stage.”
Ferrari’s poor run also coincided with an upgrade in Barcelona that didn’t perform as expected, but the team bounced back with 43 points across the two rounds before the summer break. Ahead of a race weekend at Zandvoort that he’s warned that is likely to be a case of damage limitation, Vasseur says it’s a complex challenge to effectively improve car performance, with small gains having a big impact.
“On one hand we are convinced – and it’s obvious – that for one tenth, or a tenth and a half, you completely change the philosophy of the weekend. This means that we are all pushing to bring parts and you know that the correlation between what we are doing at the factory and the track for the bouncing is not an easy one.
“It was not easy for Mercedes, it was not easy for us, it was not easy for other teams since the beginning of the season. And we are also on the edge of the development, I think we’ve had the same regulations for [three] years now and we have a kind of asymptote of performance. It’s more and more difficult to change the last tenth of a second, we are a bit more on the limit and it’s true for everybody.
“We have to police ourselves on the fact that bouncing is key. It’s not just a matter of performance but mainly a matter of confidence of the drivers. It means that if you gain one tenth due to downforce and you are losing three tenths in the confidence or the consistency of the drivers then at the end of the day the P&L (profit and loss) is negative.”