The Italian squad is having their worst Formula 1 season since 2009 as they haven’t earned any points yet. Sainz, a driver from the team, said in the Australian Grand Prix that Red Bull is much better than them in qualifying, race performances, and even top speeding.
Our car doesn’t perform as well in medium and low-speed corners, or when going over the kerbs and bumps. We need to explore more options since our car did really well at the beginning of last season. So, we need to try something that’s different from what we have now.
“Red Bull has a lot of power over us so we need to look all around us for more support.” Recent rumors said Ferrari was planning some extreme changes, but team leader Fred Vasseur said no to that plan. Instead, the team is going to have three rounds of improvements in the next few months that should help them out.
When asked if there was a new idea coming, Vasseur answered no. They have plans to add updates to the car at future races like Miami, Imola (not Monaco), and Barcelona. These new updates will make the car even faster but unfortunately, this won’t happen for Baku because it’s a sprint race.
We are still following our planned strategy for the car. We have made some improvements in its performance and it was doing much better in Melbourne compared to before and we’ll keep going with this.
It’s not like a completely new car, that’s not what we’re aiming for here. We will continue to work on this one and make as many changes as possible.
Vasseur said that due to the cost and wind tunnel hour limits, it’s almost impossible to make a brand new car design when already in the middle of the season. Making something totally new would be extremely challenging with these restrictions.
We think that we are making good progress with the car and believe that there is still lots of space for improvement. We can make more changes to the car to improve its performance by getting more downforce, a better balance, and more stability. That’s why it makes sense to keep going in this direction.
– Ferrari thinks the punishment they got for costing more than allowed in Red Bull F1 was not a proper penalty.
– They want to review the penalty given to their driver, Sainz, during an Australian GP race.
– Ferrari’s way of dealing with all the challenges they face so far is to quickly introduce the improvements they had planned instead of making an entirely fresh car design.
Vasseur said that a plan of development was set up for the season, but then other factors like how competitive and responsive the car is had to be taken into consideration too. The team took action fast and already brought improvements in Melbourne and will keep doing so. They may also take different directions to try and speed-up the process.
“We can’t make a lot of changes to the plan after only three races.” However, if things don’t get better, the team is open to changing their direction when building their 2024 car.
We’re talking about how much money we can spend on the car for racing and also about what parts should be kept from one race season to the next. Do we want to keep the big pieces like the monocoque (the frame of the body) or gearbox? We’ll have to figure out a way to make this work within our budget.
“We have some new ideas on how to develop and make progress. We’ll see if we need to adjust things here and there or if we need to make a bigger change later in the season.”
