23/02/2021
NEWS STORY
Alfa Romeo boss, Frederic Vasseur insists his team's relationship with Ferrari is getting "better and better" and that he's confident the Italian manufacturer can recover the ground it lost last season.
While the fact that 2020 saw Ferrari suffer its worst season since 1980 has been well documented, one tends to forget that customer teams, Alfa Romeo and Haas also struggled.
While Alfa, like Ferrari, had aero issues, the fact is that the Italian manufacturer's power units were never the same following the technical directive saga of late 2019.
While Ferrari was under pressure from AlphaTauri in the battle for sixth in the standings, between them Alfa Romeo and Haas scored just 11 points.
Heading into the new season, Alfa team boss, Frederic Vasseur is confident that 2021 will be altogether better.
"The collaboration with Ferrari is going very well," said the Frenchman. "We had a strong meeting, a long meeting during the winter, to cover the points of last year where perhaps we didn’t do the perfect job. But we are on the good path.
"On their side, they will recover probably a large part of the issues we had last year," he added. "The collaboration is getting better and better."
Beyond engines, and at a time the Maranello outfit has deployed Simone Resta to Haas, Vasseur admits that Alfa may look to Ferrari for greater collaboration.
"We want to take some of their stuff," he admits, "perhaps one or two elements, but not much more.
"I think it's not the key point of the collaboration," he adds. "The key point of the collaboration is to be convinced that we can learn from each other in the scope of the regulation, and we have to play with this and to do the best job that we can do."
Referring to the regulations introduced this season, he said: "Even if we have some restrictions and changes to the regulations, we still have some freedom to develop the car on the aero side, and we did it.
"But it doesn't matter if you have developed the car, you have to do a better job than the others.
"We did some good improvements; the FIA decided to change the regulations to slow down the cars, and I think that we came back at a decent level."
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