Qualifying the key to Ferrari woes - Arrivabene

Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivabene says qualifying difficulties are the main reason it is struggling to challenge Mercedes more strongly.

Red Bull beat Ferrari at the Spanish Grand Prix and duly emerged as the biggest rival to Mercedes in Monaco as Daniel Ricciardo took pole position and finished second to Lewis Hamilton after a pit stop error. With Sebastian Vettel starting and finishing fourth, Arrivabene says the qualifying results are preventing Ferrari from maximising its potential.

“The only podium that we were missing is [Monaco]," Arrivabene said. "At the beginning of the season I won’t tell you the story again, you know what’s happened, but I don’t want to find any excuses. We were not good enough in Barcelona - only in Q3 - and the same also here and then we paid the fee during the race.

“I take the lessons and we need to really understand what the problem is because if you recall in Q1 not only in Barcelona because it’s another story but here in Q1 we did a 1:14.1 [sic] and we are slower in Q3. So that is the problem that we have to look for.”

Arrivabene is slightly out with his example as Vettel did a 1:14.610 in Q1 - setting the pace - but only improved by 0.058s in Q3 while pole-sitter Ricciardo's improvement was 1.3s.

With Vettel pitting early for intermediate tyres and getting stuck behind Felipe Massa, Arrivabene defended Ferrari's strategy, saying it needed to be aggressive to try and make progress.

“The strategy was correct. Like it or not it was right. When you are running in that position you have to be on an aggressive strategy and then we had Massa in front of us and this could happen when you are on an aggressive strategy. Without that we are in a different position talking about something else. Having said so, I don’t want to find any excuses but it could happen when you try an aggressive strategy.”

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.