Vasseur on Hamilton joining Ferrari's team culture: 'Will be a good asset'
F1 News
- Savannah Lenz
Today marks Lewis Hamilton's first official day as a Ferrari driver. His move had been highly contested by fans and critics alike. Ferrari team principal, Frederic Vasseur, is eager for what the British champion can bring to Ferrari in terms of mentality and competitive culture.
Hamilton heads to Ferrari
In the Abu Dhabi paddock, Vasseur spoke about the differences in team cultures. He said, "I think it's always important to have people coming from other teams with a different culture. It's nothing to do with Italians or English or whatever. And it's not; it's just that we are in the business. When the transfer of know-how is important, and we are, as Ferrari, we are a bit isolated, but it will be a good push for us to have; it's already the case because we were recruited a little bit on some other team to some other team".
During the interview with Vasseur, Andrea Stella was mentioned as he had worked at Ferrari until moving to McLaren. Stella took some of the Ferrari culture and mindset with him to McLaren. The Frenchman noted, "I think it's a good push because you see it a bit differently. I'm convinced that Lewis will come with his own experience, with a background of 18 years in F1 or 17, a couple of titles, and so on." Vasseur continued, "It will be a big push just to keep this mindset, to try to do a bit better everywhere, not to imagine that the performance is coming from the others into the team.
'Performance is coming from everybody'
"It's not that the performance is coming just from Aero or whatever, it's coming from everybody, and this is important, and I perfectly remember Lewis, 2005-2006, that he was already like this, pushing on small details, and at the end of the day if you have a look, I think average the delta between McLaren and us probably in qualification is a couple of hundreds, and we are really at this stage and it’s also with Red Bull and Mercedes that we are speaking about details coming from one with the peak of the car." Hamilton has switched teams twice, once from McLaren to Mercedes and now from Mercedes to Ferrari.
Vasseur concluded, "It means that we really need to have this kind of mindset to chase the last one thousandth on every single area, and I think Lewis will be a good asset for this also".
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