Charles Leclerc’s victory at the Italian Grand Prix has injected a sense of optimism into the Ferrari team, but team principal Fred Vasseur remains cautiously measured given the relentless twists and turns of this year’s Formula 1 battle.
The latest round of upgrades implemented by the Scuderia at Monza, which included a new floor designed to mitigate Ferrari's chronic bouncing issues, seemed to work well at the Temple of Speed.
Both Leclerc and teammate Carlos Sainz were able to extract impressive race pace, with the team crucially demonstrating better tyre management than its McLaren and Mercedes rivals.
Yet, Vasseur was quick to temper expectations, emphasizing the unique nature of Monza and how little it reveals about the car’s overall performance in more typical race conditions.
“Honestly it’s quite difficult to understand the impact of the upgrade on a track like Monza because we are in a so different configuration compared to the rest of the season that it’s quite difficult to understand,” Vasseur told the media after the race.
His comments underline the challenges that come with interpreting performance swings in a season where Formula 1 cars have been heavily impacted by track-specific conditions.
Monza, with its long straights and low-downforce demands, represents an outlier in the calendar.
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Ferrari’s performance in qualifying, while competitive, also revealed that they were still slightly behind their top opponents.
In a fiercely tight session where fractions of a second separated the front-runners, Vasseur was keen to point out how close the margins have become at the sharp end of the field.
“When you see the quali and you have six cars or seven cars in less than one tenth, every single bit makes the difference that for one hundredth I’m keen to go for it,” Vasseur explained.
“At the end of the day, we had four cars in two hundredths, I think in qualifying in Monza. And for sure you can say that the upgrade is crucial, but at the end, the pace in the race was more linked to the tyre management.
“It’s in quali where you have six, eight cars in one or two tenths that every single upgrade will play a lot.
“In Zandvoort, I was convinced that it was a difficult one for us on paper for different reasons and I was convinced that the next three events would be probably a bit better, that Monza was better.
“But clearly in Zandvoort we were nine tenths off in quali, in Monza we were one tenth, and I think Baku and Singapore could fit also the car and that’s it.”
Given the remarkably tight competition, and the potential performance swings from one race to the other, Vasseur is on the sidelines when it comes to predicting the future.
“I think it would be a huge mistake to try to draw any conclusion or to change the plan,” said the Frenchman. “And so as you said, it’s a very long way until Abu Dhabi and that we have something like 415 points on the table, I don’t know. It’s so tight, the fight, honestly.
The Scuderia chief admitted that it’s the first time he’s witnessed such an incredibly tight spread between F1’s front runners, with a pecking order that can change on a whim from race to race but also from session to session.
©Ferrari
“I spent a couple of years on the pit wall but it’s the first time that I think in F1 we have this situation where eight drivers can win the race without an accident or a big crash, that four teams are able to win or to be on the podium, and it’s changing from session to session,” he noted.
“For me the most impressive was in Spa where McLaren top in FP1, Red Bull in FP2, we started on pole and Mercedes won the race.
“I think it is like this almost everywhere, except Lando who dominated in Zandvoort but I think until the end of the season it will be like this and it will be a huge fight.
“And it’s true that with eight cars, with this kind of competitiveness, one team can do 1-2 and the other one 7-8.
“I don’t want to speak about DNF and this can make a huge difference in terms of points. Let’s be focused on Baku first and step by step we’ll see.”
Ferrari’s Monza win may have been a morale booster, but in a season as tight and unpredictable as this one, there’s little room for complacency.
Vasseur, ever the realist, knows that the true test of Ferrari’s upgrades—and their championship hopes—will come over the next few rounds.
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