New Scuderia Ferrari boss Frederic Vasseur confirmed earlier today that the call to give Ravin Jain more responsibilities and promote him to the role of chief strategist is part of a complete review of the Maranello team’s Formula 1 strategy division, with Spanish engineer Inaki Rueda moving to a different position and working from Maranello.
Ferrari have been heavily criticised during the previous championship as a result of several big strategy mistakes, especially in the first half of the 2022 F1 season, when the F1-75 car was able to challenge Red Bull, but Charles Leclerc lost valuable points due to questionable decisions from the Maranello pit wall, as was the case in Monaco, at Silverstone and Hungaroring.
Following the resignation handed in by Mattia Binotto at the end of the 2022 F1 season, Frederic Vasseur was the one chosen by the Ferrari senior management to take over the Formula 1 Racing Division. One of the first major decisions made by the French manager was to name 28-year-old Ravin Jain as Head of Race Strategy, replacing Inaki Rueda, who will have a more marginal role.
Frederic Vasseur took part in Friday’s press conference at the Bahrain International Circuit and was asked the decision to make this change to the Maranello team’s strategy personnel. The ex-Alfa Romeo boss confirmed it was part of a much larger review on identifying solutions to improve the team across all divisions, a process that was started even before he joined the team:
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“We had the discussion last week, but strategy is not about the person that you have on the pit wall.” – the French manager pointed out – “Strategy is the addition of tons of things: The software that you have at home, the team that you have at home, the communication flow is crucial and then you have a guy on the pit wall. For different reasons, we decided to do the move, but the move was also a bit initiated last year. We will review completely the approach on the strategy.” – he added.
Answering questions from the journalists next to Red Bull team principal Christian Horner in the team principals’ press conference on Friday, Frederic Vasseur wanted to highlight the world champions’ own approach constantly becoming even better as a target that the Italian side has to emulate in order to challenge for the title:
““We need to have this approach in every single area of the team, in every single department and we have to do this job. I’m pretty sure that Christian is doing the same to try to improve in every single area. If you stay at the same level two weeks in a row, you are dead – because everybody is improving. It’s part of the process. We tried to review what was working last year and what was not working and we took action. But it’s not about the person.” – he continued.
Scuderia Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz did not have a smooth start to the Bahrain weekend, finishing fifth and 20th, respectively, in the first free practice session in Sakhir, as Ferrari focused mostly on running on the medium compound tyres. One of the negative aspects of FP1 was Charles Lecerc’s attempt to test the new rear wing brought by the Maranello team to the Bahrain International Circuit. The rear wing was seen flexing at high speed, which determined Ferrari to postpone its evaluation for future race weekends:
“It was a test item that we are not able to do last week,” he explained. “We tried to do it this morning but, as you saw, it was not very positive. We won’t run the wing during the weekend but we will be back soon.” – the Ferrari boss concluded.
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