Fred Vasseur: "Today we celebrate, but it's too soon to talk about competing with Red Bull"

Melbourne, what a performance by Ferrari! But Fred Vasseur tempers the excitement

After such a one-two finish, it’s nothing but celebration time. For one day, Scuderia Ferrari won’t be thinking about how to catch up to Red Bull, because they have finally beaten them. They did it with some reliability problems for Max Verstappen (who retired on the third lap due to a brake issue), but also in terms of pace, considering the 56 seconds lead over Sergio Perez. This indicates that even for the Dutchman, it would have been difficult to contain the SF-24 at Albert Park.

Fred Vasseur’s comments
The team principal of Ferrari, Frederic Vasseur, by nature and in his role, allows for celebrations but at the same time dampens the excitement: “It’s really too soon to talk about fighting for the championship with Red Bull. We’ve made a big step forward compared to last season. We will rebuild our pace from Friday also in Suzuka, but we don’t want to jump to conclusions today. We must commit in the same way without thinking we’ve made it, continuing to focus on our goals,” the Frenchman commented to Sky Sport F1.

“Since the beginning of the season, I’ve been saying that our drivers are doing very well and are pushing each other to improve session after session. This is part of an emulation process that is necessary within the team. They are very smart also on track, when we asked them to hold positions, and from the first lap everything was perfect.” – he explained.

“This year the car is more stable for us and the drivers, and it’s a better base for development and improvement over the weekend. We manage to be more consistent, unlike last year. It’s really too soon to draw conclusions, but certainly, we are doing better than 12 months ago. The journey is very long ahead of us, we are at the beginning of the season, the fundamental thing is to understand the car and get the best out of the package we have,” he continued. I don’t know and no one knows if this one-two finish would have happened without Max Verstappen’s retirement. If we make a comparison with Perez’s pace it seems manageable, but we can’t know and it’s a completely different situation. Today we celebrate and we must enjoy what happened, we still have 20-21 races to compete with Max. The pace has been great from the start, I’d say one of the cleanest weekends of my last 12 months. From FP1 we found the right pace, we were always at the front and very consistent on the long run, and today in the race we did very well.” – the French manager pointed out.

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“There’s still a bit of room for improvement for the next weekends, but this applies to everyone on the grid. We no longer have winter testing, so it takes us a couple of events to better understand the car. I’d say this weekend we did very well, but in the end, Suzuka will be a completely different situation and we’ll start from scratch. It’s not guaranteed it will be like this every weekend, we need to continue to push and develop with this mindset without thinking we’ve made it or that everything is done.”

“The team is more than motivated and we’ll continue to push. The setup of the weekend was right, the balance was right from the first lap of the first day, and this makes a huge difference because then we can focus on the details. I believe it was clear to everyone that everything went very well, from start to finish. Now let’s enjoy this weekend, then we’ll see in the future.” – Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur concluded at the end of the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne.