"Our car is too sensitive” – with these words, given in an exclusive interview with Motorsport.com, Frederic Vasseur took stock of Ferrari's vintage. The more time passes, the more French he begins to have the management of the group is under control – remembering that the SF-23 is not, in a certain respect, entirely “his” car.
Ferrari, a very particular season
The steps forward have arrived and little can be said about this. Ferrari's start to the season has been very disappointing from many points of view, not so much for the impossibility of seeing the Red team fight for the title, but how much for witnessing an SF-23 fourth force on the track. Things have changed over time and the updates brought to Barcelona have borne fruit. In Canada and Austria we saw an excellent Ferrari which, especially in Spielberg, managed to stay ahead of Mercedes and Aston Martin, also taking the podium with Charles Leclerc.
What didn't work at Silverstone?
A Silverstone but it didn't go exactly like that it was expected. The prancing horse concluded in ninth and tenth position with Leclerc and Sainz. A clearly subdued performance which, exclusively to Motorsport.com Italia, Vasseur wanted to explain thus: “It was the combination of a couple of things. In qualifying I think we had the potential to be on the front row, we were a couple of tenths behind Verstappen, but we made some mistakes. Then on Sunday there was an increase in wind and we already knew that we would be exposed to this problem in the British GP".
Vasseur's analysis: “We suffer too much diagonal wind”
A sensitivity of the machine so strong that even the direction of the wind can be decisive: “The car is too sensitive when there is diagonal wind. We are working to try to improve in this area because when the wind is frontal we don't have any kind of difficulty. At Silverstone there were strong gusts and this was compounded by the fact that we hadn't done free practice on Friday and we were a bit in the dark with the tires so we were worried about tire degradation. And that's why we opted for a media-hard strategy, like McLaren did, while everyone else went for media-soft. Also, we made the pit stop too early. With the medium-hard strategy it would have been normal to stop for the pit between the 20th and 30th laps, but we were fighting with Russell who was on soft tires and we didn't want to risk suffering an undercut. We made the stop early for this, but we made a mistake. As if that wasn't enough, there was the Safety Car which complicated things even more. So yes, there was a combination of five or six different factors."
Vasseur ahead of Hungary: “We can hope for a pole”
But now there is Hungary, with Ferrari intending to get back up Vasseur has no doubts about this aspect"I can say that we go better in slow corners and ninety degree bends than in big bends, at least this is what we have seen so far. We can hope for a pole position… I think the key factor could be the wind. But Spa could also be a track that goes well with the characteristics of our single-seater, there is the Bus Stop chicane, the Source and there are only two high-speed corners."
The full interview is available at Motorsport.com Italy
