Frédéric Vasseur has just finished his first season as team principal of the Scuderia Ferrari Formula 1, inheriting from the previous management a single-seater considered difficult to understand by Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz.
Third place in the Constructors’ World Championship – although they came close to second by a few points – is a reflection of the difficulties encountered by the Maranello team. But the season didn’t go on just one track, because since the end of the summer the SF-23s have improved quite a bit, recovering almost all of the 70 points of deficit that separated the Red from Mercedes and taking home the victory at the Singapore Grand Prix. This means that Ferrari was the only one to win a race other than the elusive and dominant Red Bull Racing.
The road to returning to winning on a regular basis and putting pressure on Red Bull is still long and tortuous. Vasseur is aware of this and for this reason he spoke about what the team will have to do to be ready for next season. No (yet another) revolution: we will have to push on the details to bring them to the limit where things have already gone better, but also plug the holes where they are still open to try to catch up with the Milton Keynes team.
“We won’t have to upset everything in 2024. When you’re 3, 4 tenths behind… I mean, not even Red Bull have a magic wand. They’re doing a better job. We lost a lot of points because of the reliability, the operations in track, impediments. We must not just focus on one area.”
Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari SF-23
“If we found ourselves concentrating on doing that, it would be wrong. It won’t be like that. We have a different approach to that, we will try to bring every aspect to the limit. Already during this season we have managed to improve a lot in certain aspects, we will have to maintain the same approach in 2024 and we will see where we are in Bahrain. We will have to stay positive.”
“We will certainly analyze the season and there is a lot of room for improvement in many areas, many departments. We will try to do a better job next year, but it is part of the DNA of a racing team. I am convinced that the “Next year we will be even more motivated and this is why I am convinced that we will close with a good result, which will be a good start for 2024.”
Not the 2023 results, but the dynamics of work. This convinced Vasseur, so much so that it pushed him to ask for the same commitment, the same dynamics used this season. The French manager is convinced that it is the right path and that is where he will continue to push his team also in 2024.
“I will ask the team to continue with the same dynamic, if we don’t want to talk about results. The most important thing is to have this type of attitude even in difficult moments. It went like this this year even when we were in difficulty and that’s what it allowed us to improve things over the course of the season,” concluded Vasseur.
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