Vasseur says ‘balloon tyres’ behind Ferrari Qatar meltdown

Ferrari’s weekend in Qatar was so bleak you’d forgive the Scuderia for wanting to bury the timing sheets under the desert sand at Lusail. And team boss Fred Vasseur didn’t sugarcoat it.

The Frenchman zeroed in on the mandated Pirelli tyre pressures – describing a car behaving “like on a balloon” – as the primary culprit behind Ferrari’s worst performance of the season.

But even as he jabbed at the rules, Vasseur admitted that every team faced the same reality. Which, of course, made the Italian outfit’s depressing result sting even more.

‘Like on a balloon all weekend’

Ferrari walked away from Lusail with a miserable four points, courtesy of Charles Leclerc, while Lewis Hamilton was left stranded outside the scoring zone.

Their qualifying form was just as bruising: ninth and 18th for the sprint, then 10th and 18th for the Grand Prix. Three races after sitting second in the constructors’ standings, Ferrari has now sunk to fourth.

Vasseur didn’t hide the scale of the struggle.

“As a team we have to try to understand what we did wrong this weekend,” he said on Sunday night.

“From my understanding so far it's linked to the tyre pressure, the prescription, that we were a bit like on a balloon all weekend and we struggled to deal with, but it's the same for everybody, it means that we did a worse job than the others.”

With Pirelli capping stint lengths at 25 laps due to durability concerns, teams were forced into rigid strategies – and Ferrari, according to Vasseur, never came close to adapting.

Pressed on whether the team’s form collapse was related to halting SF-25 development back in April, he pushed back.

“Honestly not, but at the end of the day, we don't have to mix everything, because in Austin we were on the podium. It means that it's not just about development. The others, they didn't develop between Austin and today.”

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Instead, the Frenchman said Ferrari was undone by its own setup decisions.

“I think that this weekend we struggled a lot with the set-up, and [it's] probably also linked to the prescription of the tyre pressure,” he elaborated.

“We struggled from lap one to the last lap of the race. It was probably a bit better today, but marginally. But it's part of the explanation. But the main part of the situation of this weekend is linked to the set-up from lap one. We were in a tough situation.”

‘If you start miles away, you are dead’

Ferrari’s weekend was also disrupted by a power steering issue and the unforgiving sprint-format schedule, which allows only a single practice session before parc fermé lockdown. That left the team firing off sweeping setup changes rather than fine-tuning – a potential death sentence in modern F1.

“We made big changes,” Vasseur explained. “I think it was OK-ish perhaps today, but we went too far away when the others are fine-tuning – if you start miles away, you are dead.”

And he didn’t exaggerate the cost of being even slightly off the pace.

“And on top [of that], today, if you do a step back by two tenths, you are losing 10 positions – I think it was Q1 yesterday when you had two tenths and a half between P5 and P16,” he said, noting the exact gap of 0.241 seconds.

The brutal numbers left little hope for recovery.

“That means that if you are out of the window, for sure you lose tons of positions. And on a track like this where you have zero deg, not easy to overtake with the layout of the track, and on top you impose the two stops, [forget about coming] back,” he admitted.

Ferrari leaves Qatar bruised, winded, and searching for answers. Vasseur insists the pressure wasn’t the only problem — but based on the results, it was more than enough to pop the Scuderia’s weekend.

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