Ferrari edging closer to McLaren, Vasseur says

Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur says that while his team is still far from its performance targets, its climb into second place in the constructors’ championship shows it is getting closer to McLaren.

Ferrari moved ahead of both Red Bull and Mercedes at the Spanish Grand Prix, courtesy of Charles Leclerc’s third place and Lewis Hamilton finishing sixth. Vasseur’s team had been fifth in the standings and 40 points adrift of second-placed Mercedes two races into the season, but after a solid showing in Barcelona he feels the team is slowly making progress toward the primary goal of catching McLaren.

“I prefer to be second than fourth or fifth,” Vasseur said. “And honestly, if you look at the fact we were 50 or 60 points behind Mercedes and Red Bull after China when we were disqualified, and now we are in front of them, I think that over the last four or five events we did a decent job. But we want to win races – we don't want to be P2. It means that we have to be focused on McLaren.

“I'm not speaking about the championship but about pace, and I think [in Spain] we were not that far away with the pace in the first 40 laps. It means that we need to continue to push in the same direction if we want to win races.”

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A technical directive introduced at the Barcelona weekend led to teams having to stiffen up their front wings due to more stringent FIA tests. Vasseur says it could have had an impact on relative competitiveness but that tires are a more important aspect to get on top of.

“Even if you change the delta performance by one tenth, it can make a huge difference in terms of position, but not compared to McLaren, because they are still probably two or three tenths ahead," he said. "If you take the picture of the race at lap 40, we were five seconds behind [Lando] Norris, I think, at one stage. That means the pace was much better than three or four races ago when we were lapped in Miami.

“I don't want to say that it's the front wing – I don't do a shortcut on this – but the picture of each race is different. I think that we all have the same issue of trying to perfectly understand the tires, between the compounds in terms of consistency and performance. It was true for us, and I think it was true for the others [in Spain].

“I think we have much more in this than on the delta difference of the front wing or whatever. But even if it's not the biggest performance contributor, you have to take it into consideration, because [with a change of] one tenth you change the grid completely, and it means that can be a position differentiator.”