After two
Formula 1
dates ,
Red Bull showed that it is the candidate to retain the title, while
Ferrari
was disappointed
, which could not get on the podium in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, despite placing in both tests at least one car in the second row of the start.
"Let's not fool ourselves
," called for
Frederic Vasseur
, who replaced Mattia Binotto as Italian team boss this year.
In a strong self-criticism, the head of the
Scuderia
track admitted that
the lack of rhythm of the car during the races is
"unacceptable" .
"For me the picture is quite clear. The potential of the car is good, but it is not enough compared to Red Bull, because we are not able to extract the maximum from the car at all times," he opined
.
"The most important thing in this type of situation is to know where we are going well and what we are doing wrong.
But we cannot fool ourselves
. We have to change. We have to understand where we were wrong and we have to push. It is not (enough) to talk, not like that we will be faster
," added the Frenchman.
Who until last year was the
main team
of
Alfa Romeo
analyzed the different compounds that were used in Saudi Arabia, where Charles Leclerc started with soft tires and Carlos Sainz did it with the intermediate ones and then finished both with hard ones.
"With the hard tires we had a huge lack of speed,
something unacceptable
, which we have to correct as soon as possible
," he said forcefully.
“The first stint went pretty well and Charles had a good comeback, but it was on the soft and no one knows the different compounds. Carlos had decent pace in the first stint on the medium compared to the others, but we completely lost
ground with the tough one
," he observed.
Leclerc's Ferrari leaving the Ferrari box in Saudi Arabia.
Photo EFE/EPA/Luca Bruno
For Vasseur there "is the main problem."
"If we have to improve something, it is clearly in the management of the different compounds. We really did not expect to be in this position and we need to analyze the reasons. I do not want to insist on the positive, because the result of the weekend is not good and we have
to focus on what is going wrong, not on the positive
," he remarked.
Despite this, the Ferrari team leader clarified that "qualifying went quite well" at the Jeddah street circuit.
"For sure we always want to do a better job, and it was hard to know exactly what the potential of Red Bull was because Max (Verstappen) didn't do Q3.
But at least I had the feeling that compared to Mercedes and Aston Martin we made a step go ahead
," he said.
"We were a tenth down (in qualifying), they were three and four, I think, and I think we're on the right track in terms of development. "But potential is one thing, and I think on the potential side we've given a decent step.
The thing is that we have to maintain this maximum potential throughout the weekend, and that's not what we're doing on Sunday," he concluded.
Ferrari will have ten days of work until the next race, which will be held
on April 2 in Melbourne
.
The expectation is that the SF23 can get into a podium at the Australian Grand Prix.
So far, Sainz was the closest to fourth in Bahrain and his sixth in Saudi Arabia, while Leclerc suffered a DNF start and seventh place last Sunday.
look too
Formula 1: Pérez's ride, Verstappen's comeback and a huge role of the FIA with Alonso
Fernando Alonso did not shut up and reached 100 podiums in Formula 1: from the kid of 20 to the legend of 41
