For Fred Vasseur, now Bolognese by adoption, it will be the first Imola in red. The weekend of the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix was preceded by new personnel (the change of Charles Leclerc’s track engineer as well as the official arrival of Loic Serra and Jerome D’Ambrosio) but above all by the debut of the package of updates, the first of the SF24 project.
Vasseur tried to contain expectations (really out of scale, as far as technical innovations are concerned), also talking about a more long-term future, between a Newey (which is not commented on) and a planning that at a certain point this season will see three programs alongside one another. Ferrari will not sacrifice anything to aim for 2026, the program will proceed with all the planned developments, both this year and in 2025.
How is the work divided today between updates to the current single-seater and the 2025 car?
“As for the percentage, it’s quite difficult to find an exact number. Part of the team is working on the next updates that we will see during this season, another is already focused on next year’s single-seater. We have already given the go-ahead to the 2025 car. Furthermore, work has already started some time ago on the 2026 power unit, while as regards the chassis and aerodynamics we can hypothesize a few concepts and nothing more, given that there are no regulations yet .
Can you explain to us the role that Jerome D’Ambrosio will play?
“Jerome will not replace anyone, he will be an added value for the team. We will divide the various tasks, but above all he will support me. Although I hope it doesn’t happen, maybe on some occasion he will kick my ass… and I need that too. He has great experience in motorsport, from management to driving, and will be a good resource for us for the future.”
Loic Serra, Ferrari Head of Chassis Performance Engineering, Jerome d’Ambrosio, deputy team principal of Ferrari
Photo by: Ferrari
Why was it decided to change Leclerc’s race engineer? What led to the choice of Bryan Bozzi?
“Bryan joined the team well before me! He has worked with Charles for a long time and the two have an excellent technical relationship with mutual respect. I think for Bryan the transition from performance engineer to race engineer was the natural step, a progression we often see in many teams. We know that we often find ourselves fighting on the edge of a hundredth of a second, and if you have the feeling that you can improve something it’s always better to do it, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have ‘stay as you are’ as an approach. I am really convinced that Bryan is very good, he has good technical know-how as well as experience on the track. Plus he is well settled into the team, and this will make adapting to the new role very easy.”
Adrian Newey says he’s not ready to retire yet…
“Adrian has a mega palmarès, he is the most successful engineer in the paddock, but I have no comments to make on this. Honestly, I have faith in the guys we have on the team, and as far as the future goes… we’ll know in the future. I have faith in the people we have in the company, they are doing a good job, if we compare the potential we have today compared to a year ago I would say that we have made a huge step forward. It’s not enough, because clearly Red Bull is still ahead, much less than last year but still ahead, so we have to keep pushing.”
Ferrari SF-24: here are the new radiator vents
Picture of: Giorgio Piola
Charles stated that the expectations of some media regarding the package of updates that you will bring to the track this weekend are perhaps too high. What can we really expect from this race?
“I don’t know what the media expects, so I can’t say whether we will have more or less than their predictions. From the beginning of the season there is a delta that separates us from Red Bull which fluctuates between zero and five tenths, and it will be like this until the end of the year because it is a gap linked to the various types of tracks and conditions. The upgrade can result in an improvement of certainly less than five tenths, so we could be ahead without the upgrade or be behind with the upgrade.”
“We are developing the car, trying to shave cent by cent, but we must always keep in mind that what happens on the track, starting from the setup, to the conditions of the weekend, the performance of the drivers, if one of them makes a mistake becomes much more important for an update”.
“It would be a mistake on my part, as well as on the team and the riders, to think that an update could be at the center of everything. It will certainly help, if we take a look at the last race weekends we found ourselves fighting on several occasions on the edge hundredths if not thousandths, and in these cases if you have an upgrade that’s a tenth faster it can get you around the weekend. But we have to stay calm and not imagine that an upgrade determines everything.”
Senna 30 Years sticker on the Ferrari SF-24
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images
You are still waiting for the technical regulations regarding the 2026 single-seater, if there are no delays it should be made official on June 1st. Are you satisfied with what was discussed in the F1 Commission?
“I’ll make a premise: as far as I’m concerned, I’m in no hurry to have the 2026 regulation, on the contrary. If the FIA had already made everything official today, we would probably have two or three teams ready to set aside the current and next seasons to focus everything on 2026, and this would allow them to have a huge advantage.”
“I honestly pushed to postpone the publication of the technical regulations to October, given that in this period of time we will still be focused on the latest developments of the current season and on 2025. But in any case we won’t be able to work on the aerodynamics before the next 1st January, and I find it a good thing because the real problem in terms of resources is aerodynamics. Then there will be those who decide to focus 100% on 2026 starting from January 1st, giving up upgrades on the 2025 car, but those. they are choices that will change from team to team.”
When did work begin on the update package you’re bringing to the track this weekend? Was it influenced in any way by what we saw in the very first part of the season?
“We actually started working on it before the season debut. The single-seaters that we see on track in the first race on the calendar are released by the end of January at the latest, this means that work is already underway on the first update in February. We decided to bring the whole package to Imola because we didn’t want to do it in a sprint weekend like Miami, with just one free practice session it’s not easy to manage.”
“We could have made a bet and tried, but in the end we made the decision to focus on Imola because we will have FP1, FP2 and FP3 available to evaluate everything. In the last two years we have seen that an update initially doesn’t seem to go as planned expected, only to then discover that the gain of two tenths was there but hidden by the loss of two tenths on the set-up. We must not consider the gain as immediate, sometimes it takes a little time to put everything into focus, and have a having three free practice sessions helps.”
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