With Lewis Hamilton set to walk through Maranello’s doors next year and Carlos Sainz leaving, there has been suggestions that Ferrari will view this year as a transition year so that the car can develop further for when Hamilton arrives and the Italian team can return to title-competing ways.
Fred Vasseur, Team Principal at Ferrari, has put those suggestions to rest. The Frenchman is focused on moving the team forward this year after good gains through the course of the last campaign.
“No, this is wrong, 2024 won’t be a transition year,” said the Frenchman. “It’s a quite important season for us and I’m fully focussed on this.
“I think the best way to prepare something is to do a good job. It means that we are focused on ’24, we want to get the best, we want to win races, we want to continue on the path of 2023, and we won’t be at all thinking about 2025.”
Vasseur also took to the fact that the development project never stops, and that 2024 continues to make the car even faster and more competitive than before.
“I would say that by DNA, if you start to be happy with what you have, you are dead,” he said. “It means that you need to be always in the mindset of continuous improvement, to try to work on your weaknesses, and to try to step on some areas.
“And so it’s a no-end project. For sure people are starting to join the team now, and this is good news. It’s day after day, I think we are reinforcing the team, we are making steps.
“But again, it’s not that tomorrow morning I will say now we are there, I’m happy with the situation. If you start to have this kind of approach, I think it’s the beginning of the end.”
Vasseur looked back on 2023 and the team’s growth. He wants to build on them.
After a very difficult start to the year, five poles post-summer break and a brilliant win for Carlos Sainz at the Singapore Grand Prix showed Ferrari made some progress in understanding and improving their car.
“If you have a look at last year, we had a very positive evolution all over the season,” he said. “But we had some stages of the season when Charles was performing a bit more, when Carlos was performing a bit more.
“Into the recovery of the team, between the first part and the last part, I think the drivers played a decent role. We need to have this kind of evolution in a racing team. And we are there today.
“For sure, we want to have more, we want to push more, it’s the DNA of our racing team. But honestly, I’m really convinced that we will have this kind of positive evolution again in ’24. And this will be very helpful to continue to improve.”
