Ferrari brand ambassador and long-standing test driver Marc Gene is confident the Italian side will be able to challenge Red Bull and Mercedes for the 2023 Formula 1 titles if Ferrari can avoid the errors seen several times during the 2022 championship.
The season started with high hopes for the Scuderia after the outstanding pace shown in the pre-season testing session, which was confirmed in the beginning of the championship with two race wins for Charles Leclerc after the initial three rounds in 2022, which gave fans hope that the Maranello team would finally fight for the top spot.
Yet for the rest of the year, Scuderia Ferrari would secure just two other victories due to a series of power unit reliability issues, poor strategy decisions from the Maranello pit wall and a few driver mistakes which made things easy for Max Verstappen and Red Bull, on their way to the Drivers and Constructors championships.
A direct consequence of the disappointing 2022 season was the resignation of Ferrari Team Principal Mattia Binotto, who will therefore leave the Maranello team after three decades at the end of the year. This means that Ferrari will name its fifth team principal in ten years
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When asked about the disappointing outcome of the Italian side’s title hopes, Marc Gene pointed out that there are three main problems, explaining that all of them have been fixed ahead of the 2023 campaign:
“We’ve made mistakes this year,” Marc Gene admitted in an interview for the F1 Nation podcast.
“First reliability, but we knew that; we wanted performance. We knew we were going to get reliability with the engine later on, and we’ve been more reliable later on in the season.” – the former Formula 1 driver added.
Marc Gene pointed out Charles Leclerc’s solid performance on his way to second place in the Drivers standings thanks to his P2 at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix at Yas Marina and felt Scuderia Ferrari had fixed the strategic decisions that cost lots of points in the first half of the championship.
“Strategy, of course, we’ve made some mistakes, even drivers sometimes have made some mistakes, but I think that that last race [in Abu Dhabi] shows that we can also be perfect in reliability [and] drivers. Charles was perfect, strategy was perfect. Pit stop, the team was perfect, better than Mercedes and Red Bull, so we can do the job. If we really learn from where we have not been perfect, it shows this weekend that we can beat anyone.” – the Ferrari brand ambassador explained.
The Maranello team has been waiting for a new F1 Drivers’ Championship since 2007, when Kimi Raikkonen won it at the end of a dramatic final round of the season, with big names of the sport like Fernando Alonso or Sebastian Vettel unable to win a title in the last decade.
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