Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivabene says the Italian outfit has to “keep its feet on the ground”, despite having already reached its pre-season goal of winning two races in 2015.
Coming off a torrid 2014 campaign, the Maranello-based squad had entered this year’s championship with reasonable ambitions.
New Ferrari recruit Sebastian Vettel quickly fulfilled half of the objective by securing victory at the Malaysian Grand Prix. Although the team suffered a slight dip in performance over the past few race weekends, the German seized the opportunity to add another win at Budapest last Sunday.
But it was not all plain sailing in Hungary for Ferrari, something Arrivabene is quick to point out and use as a reminder of what still needs to be done.
“We have two victories but we have to keep our feet on the ground and work hard, as has happened this weekend,” he said. “On Friday we were struggling a lot and at one stage [Ferrari technical director] James Allison said to me, ‘If I have to think of the worst day of my career, then today is the worst!’
“But we put everything together, we were working with determination and this is something that tells you everything about this team that is getting together better and better. They were using FP3 to try to adjust the car and after that on Saturday evening we thought, ‘okay, we are in a better way’. We were not at all thinking about this result, but at least thinking we are in a good way.”
Though he urged his team to stay cool, Arrivabene nonetheless relished the opportunity to silence the critics who had doubted Ferrari’s ability to win a second race when he addressed the press after the event.
“For a month until last week they were talking about us as a disaster. Most probably they are not able to read the numbers, or they don’t want to read the numbers. So first of all, thank you for what you said, and to remind them of [our second win].”
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