After posing a title fight in the first part of the 2022 season, Ferrari suffered a huge drop in performance as the campaign progressed. Moreover, a few reliability blow-ups and crashes derailed their title challenge last year. Ferrari’s current team boss Fred Vasseur has now given his insight on the major deficit he believes his side had against Red Bull.
In an exclusive interview with Motorsport Italy, Vasseur reflected on his first year with Ferrari. He divulged about how he went about understanding the order of business at the Italian outfit. Vasseur first understood how groups worked and made decisions in the team.
“My job was to encourage everyone to be aggressive. We must be ambitious and not be afraid of making mistakes. In this respect, Red Bull performs very well, but I think we have managed to make a good step forward.”, stated Vasseur.
Red Bull are indeed not afraid to make mistakes as the same is reflected in their overall mindset on every front. Vasseur is perhaps an advocate of the same psyche and thus wishes to imbibe that at Ferrari.
Initially, Vasseur felt challenged to understand the culture of the Italian team besides looking forward to the start of the season. However, with a year under his belt, the 55-year-old admitted to being in a “much more comfortable situation”.
Back in 2022, most of Ferrari‘s losses were due to their inconsistency on several fronts. Be it reliability or strategy, the Prancing Horse fumbled a lot of their opportunities that gave Red Bull the advantage. Vasseur aims to eliminate this in the future.
Fred Vasseur has mixed feelings about the 2023 season
The 2023 season was a mixed bag for Ferrari. Uncharacteristically, they started the year struggling and had a strong second half of the season. The notable difference from last year was most of their problems were technical. Operationally and strategically, they fumbled less as the season progressed.
Fred Vasseur highlighted that he is happy about the good step forward they have taken overall. The improved pace of the SF23 helped Ferrari to seal their only win of the season in Singapore. Besides Singapore, even their home race in Monza and Las Vegas were strong weekends for Ferrari.
About Ferrari’s second-half recovery, Vasseur cited that they need to keep this “momentum” going into 2024. He said, “We have to maintain the momentum. The last part of the season went quite well but we know that it is never enough and that we must not stop.”
The 2024 season seems like another year where the Tifosi may hope it could be Ferrari’s season. Fred Vasseur has brought some semblance to things at Maranello with his leadership. Regardless, the team will look to go into the new season with tempered expectations under Vasseur’s clever leadership.
