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.