What on earth is wrong at Ferrari? – Jonathan
After the Miami Grand Prix, the questions in Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur’s news conference focused largely on the team orders debate between the team and drivers Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc during the race.
Vasseur became a little frustrated with this, and in the end said: “It’s not the story of the day,” pointing out that the only difference it made in the end was which driver finished seventh and eighth.
“I would be much more keen to speak about why we finished one minute behind McLaren,” he said.
Vasseur claimed that in the race, the car’s pace was a match for the Red Bull of Max Verstappen and the Mercedes, but Ferrari paid the price for their poor grid positions. McLaren, he admitted, were “on another planet”.
Charles Leclerc qualified eighth and Lewis Hamilton 12th, Ferrari’s worst qualifying result of the season, and that was largely because they were struggling to get the best out of new tyres.
That’s why Hamilton and Leclerc ran on used tyres in the second set of qualifying. As Vasseur put it: “Everybody improved 0.5-0.6secs between scrubbed to new and we lost 0.2-0.3secs.”
Asked why Ferrari struggled with tyres in Miami, he said: “That’s a good question. If I knew the answer, I would do a step forward and we would have fixed it between Q2 and Q3.
“You always have to operate the tyres in a very narrow window. It’s different from track to track, it’s different from compound to compound, from track temp to track temp. And it’s always after the session that you say, ‘OK, I could have done differently.'”
But that was just Miami. The wider issue is that the car is not where Ferrari expected it to be at the start of this season, after running McLaren so close for the constructors’ title last year.
Other teams – especially McLaren – made more progress over the winter, and Ferrari simply need to make the car faster.
On average, it is the slowest of the top four teams, and Ferrari have scored only one grand prix podium, thanks to Leclerc in Saudi Arabia.
Hamilton won the sprint in China, but that seems to be a case of him and the team finding a good set-up after just one practice session, while others did not, and then benefiting from clean air at the start of the race.
As Leclerc put it: “Lewis did an outstanding job. Maybe some drivers didn’t put everything together in (sprint) qualifying and he managed to do that and managed to outperform the car a bit.
“Then tyre degradation being a big thing, when you start in front, everything comes to you a bit more. Lewis made a difference on Friday and Saturday.”
There are what Vasseur calls “some small upgrades” coming at the next two races in Imola and Monaco. And Vasseur hopes that the stricter rules on front wing deflection that are being introduced at the subsequent race in Spain will make a difference.
“Everybody will have a new front wing in Barcelona,” he said. “By definition and by regulation. I think it will be perhaps a reset of the performance of everybody.”
The implication is that McLaren are benefiting from exploiting this phenomenon. McLaren themselves say they expect it to make little difference to them.
Ferrari progressed well with upgrades in both 2023 and 2024 after difficult starts. Vasseur remains confident they can do the same this year.
Hamilton said on Sunday: “I feel optimistic for the future. I think this car really does have performance. Something’s holding us back at the moment. We’ve lost performance since China. And it’s there, it’s just we can’t use it. Until we get a fix for that, then this is where we are.”
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