Home flop
Ferrari suffered a historic fiasco in qualifying for the Emilia-Romagna GP at Imola, failing for the first time ever at this circuit to get even one car into the top 10. A hard result to swallow, as Charles Leclerc explained. The Monegasque also reiterated that he sees no real potential left to extract from this SF-25. His team principal, Fred Vasseur, speaking to Sky Sport F1, once again seemed not entirely aligned with the views of his #16 driver as he analysed the disappointing Saturday.
“What’s the problem? If I knew now, I would’ve known earlier,” said the French team principal. “But it’s true that it was a strange situation. Though I think it was a bit strange for everyone today with the tyres. We must remember that in the first phase of Q2 we were around sixth position, and we set that time on used tyres. But with the new set we weren’t able to improve: others found three or four tenths, we didn’t, and we paid the price. The question of potential? I think it’s 50-50: because if we had executed everything properly, today we probably would’ve finished fifth and sixth.”
Between execution and potential
“Execution is 50% of potential,” Fred Vasseur continued in his analysis, “and execution wasn’t right, because we have to make the car perform at its real value, and today that didn’t happen. We were fifth or sixth with used tyres in the first run. That means we were capable of repeating the result and we didn’t: that means execution was poor, but the potential isn’t great either, because the goal isn’t to be fifth or sixth. It’s a balance between the two things — it’s not just one outweighing the other. Both execution and potential were lacking.”
Attention then turned to Aston Martin, which made it through the cut using medium tyres, and to the often-discussed topic of upgrades, which appeared to work very well for the Silverstone team: “Aston Martin? They were the only ones to run all of qualifying on medium tyres,” Vasseur commented, “and in the end, they finished fifth with a used set of mediums, which is unusual. Upgrades? When we talk about these things, we’re talking about tenths or hundredths of a second, certainly not half a second. Whereas with tyres, we might be talking about gains of half a second. That’s where we need to understand and find performance.”
An uphill race tomorrow
Finally, Fred Vasseur looked ahead to the race: “Our race pace yesterday was strong — that means we’ll be in the mix. But it’s also true that it’s very hard to overtake here, so we’ll have to stay sharp and probably take some strategic risks. We have thousands of fans here at the track and this isn’t what we wanted for them or for ourselves, so we must apologise for that. But let’s focus on the future — first of all, let’s focus on tomorrow and do our best for them and for us,” he concluded.
