Interview
Vasseur on Ferrari progress: 'I'm not sure we need to change anything'
- GPblog.com
Ferrari fans are hoping for better times. Just over a week before the team's most important race of the season is scheduled (the Italian GP), Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz hope to kickstart the second half of the season at Zandvoort. Team boss Fred Vasseur, during a small-scale media interview ahead of the Dutch race, elaborated on how Ferrari hopes to put the weaker pre-summer period behind them from Zandvoort, following questions from GPblog.
Vasseur has now been with the Italian team for over six months. He has not been able to celebrate a victory yet. Unlike the beginning of the 2022 season, Ferrari are not competitive enough to make things difficult for Red Bull Racing. Indeed, McLaren, Mercedes and Aston Martin are at least equal to Vasseur's squad.
In recent weeks, the team boss will no doubt have been thinking about how to put Ferrari back on the winning track. On that, speaking to GPblog and others, he says: "It's never that something is missing in a team when you are not winning, or even when you are winning, it's not that you have something special. It's not that Red Bull have a magic bullet, perhaps Max is doing a mega job today, but also it's coming from the fact that they are dominating, and they are putting Max in a very good position to do a good job."
'Ferrari must constantly improve'
Therefore, Vasseur says, "I'm not sure that we have to change something. We have to improve everywhere, in every single area, in every single department. And before we spoke about the fact that if two or three-tenths are missing, I'm much more convinced that it's ten times, two or three-hundredths of a second per lap than something else. It means that it's more a matter of mentality. We need to recruit, and we are perhaps a bit more exposed in some departments and we need to recruit and we are doing it to reinforce the team in some areas. But the process is ongoing. But I don't want to say, and I'm really convinced that it's not the case that something is missing. The team spirit is there. The passion is there. The budget is okay. The facilities are okay."
Things still have to improve, however, which is something Vasseur realises. "It means that you have to improve everywhere, on every single topic weekly. This is the mindset, and probably it's where I want to push the team in this direction, to never be happy with what you have, that you never try to get something better and to try to improve. If you start to say that I'm okay, you are dead."