Vasseur: 'I want to understand every single Ferrari mistake' – MPH

Mark Hughes

Bungled strategy, reliability issues and driver errors put paid to Ferrari's chances last season – new boss Frederic Vasseur is cautiously optimistic he can help it win in 2023

Ferrari F1 team boss Fred Vasseur

Vasseur is confident he can get Ferrari to maximise its potential

Ferrari

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Remember the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix? The infamous ‘crashgate’ race. It took a year for the full story to come out, about how Nelson Piquet Jr’s crash shortly after Fernando Alonso’s pit stop was deliberate and part of a team plan. Aside from the scandal element, the most significant part of that story was how it had robbed Ferrari’s Felipe Massa of a likely victory (and in hindsight the world championship). His short-notice pit stop in response to the Piquet-triggered safety car had him leaving the pits with the fuel hose still attached.

Stefano Domenicali was the Ferrari boss back then and after the race was in a resigned state of mind. He’d worked hard, since assuming the role from his former boss Jean Todt, at maintaining the team’s focus and discipline and it had remained a super-strong team, with fast pit stops, good strategy calls and a fast car. But there was something in the culture, he reflected in Singapore, that brought emotion to the fore in moments of stress and he seemed at a loss to know how to address it. “I think it’s just part of our identity. That passion is an asset most of the time. It drives us forward and we get strength from it. But I think you see today the downside in these sort of moments. Felipe had driven his magnificent lap to be on pole, he led the race and was looking quite comfortable there and suddenly in a split second the situation is upside down and random and you have to react and we didn’t react well.”

I was reminded of this yesterday in Frederic Vasseur’s first media call as Ferrari team principal. He’s only been there a couple of weeks so it would be unfair to expect him to have got a deep insight into where the team’s weaknesses of last year originate. But he’s clearly very aware of the positive aspect of that passion. “We have the same spirit in the racing team, that doesn’t matter if you are based in UK, in Switzerland, in Italy, the spirit is the same. But what is quite obvious in Italy is that the passion around the team is everywhere and a bit more than in every single other team. But at the end of the day, I think we have also to take the positive of this. I think it’s an advantage.”

2 Ferrari F1 team boss Fred Vasseur

New boss says the Scuderia has everything it needs to win title

Ferrari

As he moves from a small team to one of the biggest, he’s also very aware of other assets on Ferrari’s side. For years now the top three teams have had an enormous performance advantage over the rest of the field and now, arriving straight from Sauber, he’s getting to see how.

“It’s a very huge gap at 1sec per lap, even though that’s only around 1%. I [already] knew the factory from the past and from the relationship [Sauber] had in the last five or six years so it was not completely unknown for me. But for sure everything is a bit bigger, everything is a bit more up to date than what I had in the past and the group of people is bigger… I just have to give them all the support to do the job in their best condition… but at the end it’s for sure the details because if you want to speak about the simulator, for example, Ferrari’s in better shape than Sauber was or on every single area, just more advanced. But it’s difficult to say OK, that it’s crystal clear that the gap is coming from this. It’s not that you have one second somewhere; it is that you have perhaps 100 times 100th of a second, much more than one thing of five or six tenths. And I think [getting the best] is just to pay attention and to have the resources to do it on every single area. It’s a good feeling right now.”

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He’s in the Ferrari honeymoon period and it’s doubtless a heady feeling but the shortfalls which prevented the team taking on Red Bull on an equal basis last year were fairly obvious. The reliability deficit was from a single source – the ERS-h – and the dyno is suggesting that particular problem has been put to bed, (though naturally Vasseur counsels caution about that, waiting to see if the cure is replicated on track). But the more amorphous problem was that of high-stress decision-making: the sort of calls which resulted in Charles Leclerc being left out too long at Monaco and Silverstone or him taking to a dry track on inters in Brazil. The high stakes of getting it wrong in those moments seemed to ensure that they did get it wrong.

Now, that might be that emotional predisposition that Domenicali talked about all those years ago. But what’s equally sure is that processes play their part. “We are we are currently discussing about this about the organisation,” says Vasseur. “But when you are speaking about strategy or aerodynamic or another topic, you have to avoid to be just focused on the top of the pyramid. Very often when you are speaking about strategy it’s much more a matter of organisation than just the guy who is on the on the pitwall. But I’m trying to understand exactly what’s happened on every single mistake, of what’s happened last year. And to try to know if it’s a matter of decision, a matter of organisation, of communication. Very often the biggest issue is more the communication and the number of people involved than the individuals. If you put too many people discussing about the same things, then you will have the outcome of the discussion that the car will be in the next lap. You just need to have a clear flow of communication between the good people in the right positions for sure. But this is a work in progress.

“The wheel is always rolling” Frederic Vasseur

“I’m really convinced that at Ferrari today – and accepting my experience is limited to the last two weeks – that we have everything to win. We have to put everything together to do a good job, but we have everything to be able to win.”

Everyone is more than aware they are chasing a moving target and that the conditions are forever changing. As Vasseur says, “The wheel is always rolling,” but some things can be a recurring theme. Once the decision was taken by the group management not to continue with Mattia Binotto, and given that Andreas Seidl is also said to have been approached, one wonders whether Domenicali, now F1’s boss, gave any advice about Binotto’s successor. Maybe someone not from the same culture as the rest of the team is needed in order to benefit from the strengths of that culture but not the downsides. Domenicali ultimately couldn’t do that as well as his predecessor Todt and maybe Stefano saw history repeating during Binotto’s time in the role.