Fred Vasseur reflects on competitive difference between Ferrari and McLaren in start of F1 2024

Ferrari Formula 1 chief Frederic Vasseur has noted that the competitive difference between the Maranello team and McLaren fluctuates slightly in this start of the 2024 Formula 1 championship, by about a tenth of a second, depending on the track.

Throughout the initial five races of the 2024 F1 campaign, Scuderia Ferrari has mostly outperformed its rivals, securing the only race victory outside of Red Bull’s dominance at the Albert Park circuit in the Australian Grand Prix with Carlos Sainz.

However, during the recent race at the 5.451-kilometre Shanghai International Circuit in China, McLaren’s Lando Norris outperformed the Italian side, finishing as the runner-up to Max Verstappen’s Red Bull, while Scuderia Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz had a challenging weekend, ending up fourth and fifth respectively. When questioned about the Maranello team’s apparent regression relative to McLaren the latest round of the season, Frederic Vasseur highlighted that the performance gap between the teams is minimal and largely dependent on optimizing their cars for each specific circuit.

“I think it’s a matter of a tenth or half a tenth” – the French manager pointed out – “In Melbourne for example, after 60 laps we finished the race eight seconds in front. It’s more a matter of extracting the best of what we have. And honestly, we are speaking about development. First, as a team, we have to get the best of what we have, and we didn’t do the job this weekend on this. It’s not that the situation is changing massively from one weekend to the other one. It can be a bit track-related, tarmac-related. I think it was very difficult to understand the tarmac [in China], also due to the format because we did a stint with soft on Friday morning and then we went to the race with medium and we didn’t do the medium before, we did one lap in qualifying. It means that this kind of understanding of the situation, let’s say or approach of the situation can make a difference at the end because we are speaking about one tenth, we are not speaking half a second,” the Ferrari team principal added.

Frederic Vasseur points out that the closely packed field behind Max Verstappen has prevented a “normal” race weekend, which would offer a clearer understanding of which team is leading the pack behind Red Bull. The Ferrari boss explained that even the smallest of details can make a difference, which was clear in the Chinese Grand Prix weekend.

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“There is no normal weekend. It’s the beginning of the season, so we have the window that the whole is very, very tight. Perhaps Max sometimes is a bit faster. But we have a pack with six or seven cars in one tenth. That means that for details you can move from hero to zero. And when you start from P9 the race is much more difficult because you have dirty air on the first laps, even if you are faster, but basically even if you are faster you struggle to overtake because if you don’t have the big gap, you damage the tyre for the first 10 laps and then you are dead. I think it’s really a matter of putting everything together. We didn’t have a clean weekend on our side, but we made collectively too many mistakes.
“And we know that in this group, if you don’t do the perfect job you won’t be in front.” – Ferrari Formula 1 chief Frederic Vasseur concluded.