'Naive' Vasseur fed up with questions: 'Fans don't want to know this'
F1 News
Frederic Vasseur is fed up with questions about the various investigations that are ongoing or already completed. According to the Ferrari team boss, asking him about these matters is nonsense and is something fans don't want anyway.
In the press conference ahead of the Australian Grand Prix, there was once again one topic that took centre stage: transparency. It has been a recurring theme this season in F1. It started with the investigation into Christian Horner where no further information came out, but the same was true in recent weeks of the investigation into Mohammed Ben Sulayem.
Zak Brown has been very outspoken on the matter. The McLaren CEO believes such matters should be more transparent in 2024. Now teams are not told anything at all and have to believe that it was all done fairly. Vasseur, in his own words, is a bit more "naive" about it.
Why Vasseur won't say anything
"I join Zak [Brown] and Peter [Bayer] on the fact that we need to have transparency on all these cases. But honestly, the fans are not asking me at all about this. The fans are speaking about oversteering, about understeering, about competition. I’ve never had a fan or a guest asking me about the court case and so on."
When asked the next question on the same topic, Vasseur became even clearer in his wording: "But don't ask us to make any comments because we don't have access to evidence. And I think to make comments just based on gossip, rumours, and so, it's just creating another layer of...I won't say the word because I will have to go to the steward tonight. At one stage, we just have to trust the governing body, as Peter [Bayer] said before. Perhaps I'm a bit naive, but I think that we have to give them the responsibility to do this job."
'Naive' Vasseur trusts the FIA
Yet the question did not stop there. Surely, given that so many people are still asking for transparency, it indicates that most people lack that trust in the FIA and Red Bull. Vasseur, however, wants to know nothing of that.
"I don't think that we have another option than to be confident. We don't know who is the whistleblower is. We can either have an opinion on the system or not, but in this case, it's quite impossible for us, and again, I’m probably too naive, but we have to be confident with the system," the Ferrari team boss concluded.