Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur believes there will be “a real fight” for the constructors’ championship until the end of the season given the fluctuations in form among teams.
McLaren took the championship lead after Oscar Piastri’s victory in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, with Lando Norris’s fourth helping the team to leapfrog Red Bull at the top of the standings. Ferrari had taken pole through Charles Leclerc but finished second, and the collision between Carlos Sainz and Sergio Perez leaves it 51 points adrift McLaren and 31 behind Red Bull. Vasseur expects more twists and turns in the battle.
“The next race will be different because it’s the same type of corner but with much more downforce, so it’s another scenario,” Vasseur said. “But it’s true that the delta between cars, perhaps Baku aside but if you look at Monza, in Spa, in Budapest, you quite often have six or seven cars within one tenth or a tenth and a half.
“The classification is probably linked to the upgrades we are bringing or to the characteristics of the track, and I think it’s more the characteristics of the track than something else. It will be up and down until the end of the season.
“But what is important, probably where we failed [in Baku], is to win when you are in good shape but also to score good points when you are not, because we will have ups and downs until the end of the season and it’s always important to score good points when we are not in good shape.
“We failed in Canada, the UK and Austria this year and it’s probably costing us a lot. But we are back on the pace, we are back to fighting for pole position each weekend, to fight for the win, and we still have 300 points on the table until the end of the season, something like this. That means everything is possible and it will be a real fight. [Baku] didn’t turn in our direction, but we will have better weekends.”
Ferrari’s recent run of form that has delivered a win at Monza and a second in Azerbaijan comes after it introduced an upgrade in Italy, and Vasseur said a combination of new parts and tweaking set-ups with older specifications will be central to the fight.
“I think it’s true for us, but it’s true for everybody, that each single upgrade that we want to bring to the car, we are already on the edge of the performance, the bouncing and so on,” he said. “So we have to pay attention. But we can’t stay like we are either, because everybody is pushing and developing, even if it’s difficult. If we look at the grid of Monza, we had five cars in one tenth, and that means every single bit will make a huge difference.”
