AMuS: “Ferrari need to find out why only one update worked after the summer break”. Ferrari could only look on and wonder what might have been this year.

It has been nearly a decade since Scuderia Ferrari last drove its way to a Formula One Drivers’ Championship, but the iconic Italian brand remains one of motorsports biggest assets. Ferrari could only look on and wonder what might have been during the 2018 season, as a combination of its own errors and the superior driving from Mercedes rival Lewis Hamilton meant the individual race honors went elsewhere.

Four-time champion Sebastian Vettel will be joined by the talented Monacan driver Charles Leclerc at Ferrari next season. The German driver is already looking to the future and is promising to learn from the failures of this campaign. But at the same time, the Maranello team must make sure the operational errors seen in the second part of the 2018 Formula One season will no longer be repeated in order for the Italian side and both drivers to be able to fully exploit the potential of the car. This is also the view of one of the most experienced journalists of the Circus, Michael Schmidt, who is a Auto Motor und Sport correspondent for F1 racing for over twenty years:

“Here Ferrari needs to learn from Mercedes. In that aspect Mercedes is very brutal. If something does not work, they sit together on Monday. There are no excuses there, the weaknesses are discussed and most of the time solved for the next race. After the summer break, only one Ferrari upgrade (front wing) worked, everything else was bad. Now they need to find out why. If Ferrari would have seen the problem sooner, I think the championship would have been still exciting.” – Michael Schmidt said.