Ferrari has closed the gap on Red Bull according to Vasseur

Is Ferrari’s season a total success? The first Grand Prix races had certainly given a positive answer, the Italian team starting the season as the main rival of Red Bull and even achieving two victories thanks to Carlos Sainz in Australia and Charles Leclerc at his home Grand Prix in Monaco. These results have brought a wave of optimism within the team and strengthened the confidence of their new boss, Frédéric Vasseur.

We must approach this weekend being aware that we are heading in the right direction, both from a technical point of view and in terms of harmony within the team and decisions to be made on the track. The work done so far has allowed us to further reduce the gap with Red Bull,” he said just before the Canadian Grand Prix, estimating that the team had managed to significantly narrow the gap with Red Bull, moving closer to the Austrian team’s dominance.

An Italian team moving away from the front of the race.

However, since this speech, the trend has reversed as Ferrari now approaches race weekends as the fourth force in the field, a consequence of McLaren’s performance evolution, which has even overtaken Ferrari in the constructors’ standings, and Mercedes, as well as improvements that have not really worked on the Italian side. A situation that doesn’t worry the Frenchman, preferring to highlight the progress made by his team since last year.

Some notable progress compared to 2023

« I’m not a big fan of statistics, but we scored something like 60% more points than a year ago after 12 races, or something like that. We have reduced the gap by 300% compared to Red Bull. » Indeed, Ferrari has had a much more encouraging start to the season than the previous year, with an additional 117 points and already two wins, compared to just one in 2023. A regained performance and a gap that is reducing more and more compared to the Austrian team, an element that has been observed many times this season.

For example, at the Bahrain Grand Prix, Carlos Sainz finished third, 25 seconds behind the leader, a much smaller gap than the 48 seconds recorded in 2023. In Belgium, Vasseur once again praised all the work of his team after Charles Leclerc’s third-place finish, who managed to keep Verstappen and Norris behind him. The Frenchman also took the opportunity to highlight the increased competitiveness of the grid, with four teams capable of winning races.

A tightening race at the front.

« I think the four teams have done a similar job; it is not common that after 12 or 13 races, you can have four teams in a position to win the championship. It’s so tight that for one or two tenths, we will go from sixth to first. We have never seen this in F1 in Spa, to have six cars, four teams within ten seconds in Spa. There are years when the third was one lap down. » The Ferrari boss insists on the need to focus on details, as the fight for the top is now played out in tenths of a second. Ferrari must therefore continue to work on the development of its car so as not to be left behind by the other teams.

In our analysis, we must take this into consideration. We must not get upset and go search for details because that’s where everything plays out. We have four teams that are within one, two, or three tenths in pure performance. It has been like this for a few races and will continue to be so in the future. Every improvement of a tenth will help us gain positions.

Ferrari must therefore imperatively find its pace from the beginning of the season because, despite a more productive season than that of 2023, with 60% more points scored according to Frédéric Vasseur, the Italian team is under threat from Mercedes and could lose its third place in the constructors’ standings, a position it managed to acquire last year.

If the 2024 season of Ferrari has been marked by significant improvements compared to 2023, the team still has to face many challenges to maintain its position at the front of the grid. Pressure is mounting within the Maranello team as the races follow one another, and Ferrari must find a way to return to success to finish the season in style and hold onto its third place in the standings.