Ferrari was outclassed by rivals Red Bull, McLaren and Mercedes in Qatar, where Sunday’s race was mainly a case of damage limitation for the Scuderia.
Asked about the possible tyre strategies for the race with the sets at Ferrari’s disposal, Vasseur replied, “At the end we didn’t have… it’s not a secret, everybody can do the calculation, we had sixty-one laps of potential for fifty-seven laps of racing. The flexibility was quite marginal.”
The team was already managing expectations ahead of the weekend as they predicted the track characteristics would make it difficult to extract the maximum out of the capricious SF-23.
Although Charles Leclerc had a decent weekend, finishing fifth in Sunday’s race, Ferrari was only running one car as a fuel leak forced Carlos Sainz to withdraw even before the lights went out, minimising the team’s chances of scoring points and leaving them in damage limitation mode.
Photo credit: Scuderia Ferrari
“When I did the intro of the first briefing of the weekend, I told them that on paper it is not the best track for us on paper, but I told them also that I had exactly the same speech before Singapore.
“But it’s true that if you put everything together—the wind, the succession of very high-speed corners, it’s not where we were expecting to have the best result, in these conditions.”
Vasseur remains optimistic that the remaining rounds will prove more fruitful for the Scuderia.
“To score six or nine points less than Mercedes on the weekend is not a drama for us, we will have better weekends in the future.”
Asked whether Mercedes’s pace came as a surprise—Leclerc was ultimately unable to capitalise on the incident between the Mercedes duo as George Russell recovered to finish fourth, ahead of the Monégasque—Vasseur stated that he was concentrating on what Ferrari lacked in the race.
“Surprised? I don’t know, because I don’t pay attention to the others. I focus on what we have to do and we didn’t do a very consistent race, I think,” he said.
“We had graining on the second stint and we were stuck in traffic and we lost at this stage of the event. For sure, you can always do a better job, but let’s focus on the next one.”
