27/06/2024
NEWS STORY
Ferrari boss, Fred Vasseur has defended his team's development programme, insisting that it has not fallen behind its rivals.
While Barcelona was a step up after the misery of Montreal, Ferrari had little to celebrate, especially as it had brought forward a number of updates in a bid to make up the ground lost in Canada.
However, qualifying in fifth and sixth, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz finished the race in the same positions, both over 20s adrift of the winner.
And as McLaren continues to close in on Red Bull, in recent races Mercedes has also taken a step forward, leading to claims that the pair have got the jump on Ferrari.
"We are satisfied with the numbers that we get," Vasseur replied when asked if the team was satisfied with the latest upgrade package. "First, everybody is improving," he continued. "That means that it is not that because you bring something that you will do a jump in front. It is that if you don't bring, you will do a jump backwards. And everybody is bringing parts now, each two or three events.
"Sometimes you have the list of what we are publishing, but it is just aero," he added. "Don't forget that we are not developing just the aero. So sometimes we need also one or two events before to get the best from the package that we have.
"We have a kind of convergence of performance today over the last 12 months," he said, though he dined that the recent drop in performance is down to set-up. "Perhaps we do a better usage of the car next week after one event.
"It was quite often the case for everybody last year that if you have a look on the performance, when every single team was bringing something, it was sometimes the race after that the performance was there. And it will be like this until the end also because we have a kind of asymptote of performance.
"And now all the packages are much smaller than it was 24 months ago. It means that we are into the delta."
Reacting to claims by Leclerc and Sainz that Ferrari has lost ground to McLaren, the Frenchman said: "McLaren, one year ago, they finished 25 seconds ahead of us. I'm not sure that the rate of development is much bigger than what we are doing."