Fred Vasseur, Ferrari Formula 1 team boss, claims that team’s decision to take an aggressive approach yielded biggest gains.
Last winter, Vasseur replaced Mattia Binotto at Ferrari. Because of limited time to fill in the gap he could not have significant effect on car project in 2023. However, his aggressive and reorganised efforts helped the team to claim promising results in the second half.
During the season, the team had limited room to bring upgrades to its SF-23, primarily due to chassis limitations. However, he provided confidence to the team to take more risks at Maranello.
The Frenchman believes that the assurances to take risk helped gain better results rather than upgrades.
“When you arrive in this group, you need to understand how the group is working before taking any action or decision,” Vasseur said.
“The main topic for us and the biggest improvement we did the season was more on the approach and the mentality. I think that we took more risk, we were a bit more aggressive and this played a part.
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“We have to be ambitious and not be scared of any incident or something like this. I think we did a step on this.”
It provided little gains which had bigger impact on the overall position of the team. A gain of few tenths could have helped Ferrari to gain second place on constructors’ championship.
“When we said that we were in a tough situation at the beginning. We were probably two or three tenths off,” he explained. “We made a step of one or two tenths. Now the grid is so compact and so tight that for one or two tenths you can change completely the physiognomy of the weekend.
“We brought an upgrade in Japan, but it was not a big one. I’m still convinced that it’s more on the track operation that we did the step in the last third of the season. Much more than on the development of the car.
“In the last part of the season we were much more aggressive. And it’s a matter of tenths. You make up 0.020s here and 0.020s there and at the end, it’s one tenth.”
