Frederic Vasseur says Ferrari were exactly in the same situation last year when they found a solution at Zandvoort, as he pins hope on new updates.
Having had a strong start to its 2024 F1 campaign, going toe-to-toe with Red Bull, things have dropped down for Ferrari off-late. This co-incided with their latest update which seemingly brought the problem of bouncing again.
The races in Canada, Spain, Austria and Britain has hit them hard and team boss Vasseur recalls a similar situation like this last year before finding a solution at Zandvoort. “It is difficult to say after the result but we did a step forward in Silverstone,” he said. “From a technical side, we have a better understanding of the situation on Sunday evening than on Friday morning.
“This is encouraging for the rest of the season. For sure, the result was not ideal because we compromised the result in qualifying than the race. We had exactly the same situation last year, almost at the same stage of the season – Silverstone, Budapest and Spa. We stop it at Zandvoort, had a good scan of the situation and had a good recovery because the weeks after, we were there.
“What is tough in this situation is you don’t have tests, proper tests, to fix it or to at least understand it. It is very difficult as a team to compromise or sacrifice Friday sessions when you know you are losing time during the weekend and say ‘ok, let’s forget about FP1, FP2 and focus on the mid-term’.
“Trust me, this decision as a team, is difficult because you start the weekend – and it was even worse at Silverstone with the weather – and it means you put yourself in a tough situation, but this we knew before, but it was even worse that Saturday morning was with wet tyres, but it is like it is. We assumed the decision before the weekend and I think it was the right call to do it.
“We will have to have a deep analysis of the weekend and consider the fact that Silverstone is by far the most aggressive in terms of bouncing, with very high-speed corners and so on. But we will have time to discuss and decide for Budapest,” summed up Vasseur.
When asked to expand the issue and if it is more down to correlation with the windtunnel numbers, Vasseur noted that the windtunnel doesn’t show the bouncing issue. It is only when they hit the track is when they ascertain about the said problem.
Ever since encountering it, Ferrari did experiment different modes and set-ups to ascertain which one is working. In fact, during the British GP weekend, the drivers ran different specs – where Charles Leclerc started with the Barcelona spec and Carlos Sainz had Imola one.
They eventually settled for the Imola spec because it was more consistent in numbers. “Correlation is ok, the correlation on the downforce is ok,” explained Vasseur. “It is still a question mark for everybody and sometimes, the bouncing is popping up like this. It is quite difficult to have correlation because you don’t have bouncing in the wind tunnel.
“We all have metrics and you cannot anticipate you can have more bouncing with this part than another one but to know if it will have a negative impact on performance is another story. We changed all the aero parts and the bouncing appeared in Spain. To fix it you have tonnes of solutions.
“You have solutions with a compromise on performance, you have solutions without compromise on performance – developing a new package. I think we are there now, we will have to have next race with the current car and the sooner the better, we will bring upgrades that have less bouncing.
“I can’t speak about ’21, ’20 but the last 16 months, all the upgrades that we have brought have had very good correlation with what we did in the wind tunnel. It has been one of the assets of the team last year to bring small upgrades and each time, it was paying off. This one, we had an issue but it is not that we have an issue that it is the end of the world,” summed up Vasseur, who was directly questioned about its future ambitions.
Considering that they are falling in the hands of McLaren and Mercedes rather than catching Red Bull, Vasseur was asked if still intends to catch the reigning champions or rather defend its position against the faster rivals.
“Honestly, I’m not focused, and if you ask me what the classification is, I know that we are P2 because your colleague asked me the same question ten minutes ago,” answered Vasseur. “I don’t know how many points we are behind Red Bull and how many points we are ahead of – I don’t know who is P3, it’s McLaren probably.
“It’s not the topic for now, the topic of now is to find performance, to come back in the situation of Monaco, or Imola, or whatever. To be able to fight for the pole position and the win. Then the championship, we have still 12 races to go, it’s almost a championship. It means we’ll have time to change everything 10 times.”
Here’s news from Ferrari on Enrico Cardile
Here’s Ferrari trio on how British GP panned out
Here’s link to a F1 Discord channel, join in to interact
