As Lewis Hamilton continues to struggle, Ferrari’s French boss, Fred Vasseur likens car development to cooking, insisting that the ingredients must be mixed carefully.
While it appeared Hamilton had turned a corner last weekend, on Friday he appeared to struggle again, finishing thirteenth quickest, 0.622s down on his teammate.
“I’m just trying to see if I’m getting the top ten at the moment,” said the even-time world champion following the second practice session on Friday. “Not the greatest,” he added. “I think getting the tyres working today was the issue from our side.
“It’s nothing to do with the team,” he insisted, “it’s just we were struggling to get the tyres working.
“Normally on Saturday it goes backwards,” he continued, “but there’s not a lot of backwards for me to go from where I am. Hopefully, overnight we will make some improvements to the car.
“There were a few bits through the session that felt good and just once we get to the soft tyre, it’s not there. We’ll make some changes overnight and hope tomorrow we can come back stronger.”
Having introduced its new floor last week in Bahrain, this weekend the Maranello outfit has brought further updates, and, certainly in Charles Leclerc’s case, they appear to be delivering.
“The ingredients are all there,” smiled Vasseur, “but now it’s like cooking, you have to put the ingredients together at the right stage.
“Honestly, I don’t have the feeling that we’ve extracted the best from the car so far,” he admitted. “Perhaps on some occasions, in some sessions, but I’d say it’s true for us and for the others.
“Even McLaren, with the step they have compared to the rest of the grid, sometimes you have one of their cars that is struggling a bit more.
“It is what it is,” he continued. “A couple of years ago, you could go through Q1 with a set of mediums, do one lap, and you were in Q2. Today, even the top teams have to put on two sets of softs sometimes.
“Again, the field is very, very tight, and each time you make a mistake, you can lose five or six positions. Then the conclusion from those outside is that it’s a drama. We’re more focused on pure performance, and five hundredths is not a drama.
“That means we need to stay calm in the analysis if we want to improve. I think it was one of the skills of the team last year to be able to capitalise by hundredths of a second at a time. I hope we’ll follow the same path this year.”
Check out our Friday gallery from Jeddah here.
