While things seemed to be going uphill with the Barcelona update in early summer, Ferrari has since fallen back in the Formula 1 rankings. A revived Mercedes team and McLaren’s miracle update have pushed the Scuderia to the bottom of the top 10.
But it was also his own mistakes that, after the already sobering Silverstone result of ninth and tenth place, led to another setback with seventh and eighth place at the Hungaroring, as analyzed by team boss Frederic Vasseur.
“It’s not the result we were hoping for when we came to Budapest, but I think it was already badly affected by qualifying with P6 and P11,” Vasseur replies when asked what happened in the race in Hungary.
“We had to take a risk at the start and have it [Carlos Sainz] sent off on the soft tire. It was a good decision, but we also knew that we had to put on two sets of hard tires afterwards and that was quite difficult.”
“With Charles [Leclerc] the race went much better because the pace was there. But the pit stop with the penalty and the problem with the impact wrench put a heavy strain on the race.”
“I think we lost another eight seconds during the pit stop and then there was the traffic. It would probably have been P5.”
New tire allocation not optimally utilized
In addition to these mistakes in the race, Vasseur is also not happy with the use of tire allocation. The new division presented new challenges for all teams, but Vasseur feels he has not made the most of it.
“First of all, we need time to understand what we did right and what we did wrong. It’s not that easy to analyze what a perfect weekend looks like. You have to have all the results to reconstruct everything.”
“But I think we made too many mistakes from start to finish. And by that I don’t just mean the pit stop or the pit entrance or qualifying or tire management and so on.”
“In the end the potential was probably better than what we showed on Saturday and then at least with Charles we still lost 20 seconds in the race.”
Jean Todt’s footsteps are still very large
Even Frederic Vasseur, who has already brought a pile of rubble back into shape at Sauber/Alfa Romeo, has so far found it difficult to lead Ferrari back onto the road to victory. Of course, this is not a project that can be completed in half a year, but no real progress has been made so far.
Still, he remains calm: “I’ve spent the last 35 years of my life on the pit wall and every Monday of my career you have to work through the list and you have a long list of mistakes.”
“Sometimes you can see them, sometimes they’re hidden. It’s the team manager’s job to make a list of the [Fehler aller] Create team members and correct them. I’m very open and I say we will make mistakes.”
After his first six months in red, he knows what he needs to work on. So Ferrari has to play to its strength, qualifying, better: “We have the feeling that in qualifying we were very, very close to Max [Verstappen] are on, sometimes even at eye level. We have to improve, but basically we’re not that far away.”
“In terms of race pace, Red Bull is miles away from everyone. But we know that qualifying results are crucial to drive in clean air. Every car is badly affected by the ‘dirty air’. If you start second, you’re automatically in a much better position.
However, Vasseur also admits that the results are not what Ferrari had imagined, especially given the strong start to 2022. “But that’s the way it is and we have to work on it.”