22/03/2023
NEWS STORY
Ferrari boss, Frederic Vasseur has one demand of his team's engineers, he doesn't want any bullsh*tting.
His call comes just days after Franz Tost said that he doesn't trust the engineers at AlphaTauri.
While a 10-place grid penalty compromised Charles Leclerc's Saudi Grand Prix before a wheel had even turned, the Monegasque and his team still had hope that he could challenge for a podium.
However, once he and his teammate switched to the hard compound their race effectively came to an end as the pair were reduced to running together in sixth and seventh.
Other than poor pace, the Italian team is also concerned at reliability, leaving Vasseur with a mammoth task on his hands.
As the team regroups ahead of the trip down under, the Frenchman was asked what his main priority will be when he sits down with his engineers.
"To not bullshit ourselves," he replied.
"The most important thing in this kind of situation is to know where we are going well and what we are doing wrong," he continued.
"We cannot bullshit ourselves. We have to change. We have to understand where we are wrong, and we have to push. It's not enough to speak, we will not be faster like this.
"For me the picture is quite clear," he added. "The potential of the car is good, but it's not enough compared to Red Bull, because we are not able to extract the maximum from the car every time.
"The first stint went pretty well and Charles had a good comeback," he said of the race, "but he was with the soft and nobody knows about the different compound. Carlos was in a decent pace on the first stint with the medium, compared to the others, but we lost completely the ground with the hard.
"It's where we have to understand that the main issue is," he continued. "If we have some improvement to do, it's clearly on the management of the different compounds."
While relatively at ease with the SF-23's performance in qualifying, Vasseur admits that due to its reliability concerns the team is unable to maintain that level throughout the weekend.
"I don't want to push on the positive side, because the outcome of the weekend is not good and we have to be focused on what is going wrong, not on the positives," he said. "But I have to keep in mind, to do a proper analysis, of what is going well and I think that qualifying went pretty well.
"For sure we always want to do a better job, and it was difficult to know exactly what was the potential of the Red Bull because Max didn't do the Q3. But at least I had the feeling that compared to Mercedes and Aston Martin we did a step forward. We were one-tenth off, they were three and four tenths I think, and I think we are on the right way in terms of development.
"But potential is one thing, and I think on the potential side we did a decent step. The issue is we have to stay at this maximum potential all over the weekend, and it's not what we are doing today.
"I think on some occasions we are there. But on some occasions, or some stints of the weekend, we are not able to be at the maximum of our possibility."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Jeddah here.