One thing all Ferrari team principals have in common is the intense scrutiny they face from the media and the passionate Italian tifosi.

Current team principal Frederic Vasseur has experienced that again in the past week, prompting the team to reiterate its support for him.

Vasseur is trying to put Ferrari back on the path to victory. The man who most recently achieved this successfully was Jean Todt in the mid-nineties. And as reader @Tifoso1989 explains, he arguably faced a much tougher task:

The management and the way the team was being run were clearly a mess that’s precisely why Vasseur was brought in but I wouldn’t say Ferrari’s underlying technical organisation was collapsing.

The F1-75 is the clearest evidence of that. Ferrari produced the best all-round interpretation of the ground effect regulations straight out of the box. It was quick in qualifying, strong in race pace, and competitive across different types of circuits. It was the benchmark early in the season until the TD039 came in and Red Bull got the RB18 down to the minimum weight around Hungary. Whatever happened afterwards, you don’t produce a car like that if the entire technical organization is collapsing.

And Ferrari had already spent years, particularly in the period before the budget cap, investing heavily in its infrastructure to sort out the wind-tunnel/track correlation problems that had plagued them.

They had also invested in a new state of the art simulator from Bristol-based Dynisma, which was already being used in the development of the F1-75. On top of that, they were making extensive use of AWS for advanced analytics, machine learning and AI, allowing them to run simulations much faster and extract more data from the car development process.

So I think there’s an important distinction here. The management was dysfunctional. The technical foundations weren’t.

That’s actually part of my argument about Vasseur. He didn’t inherit the Ferrari of the early 1990s that Todt inherited. He inherited a team with enormous resources, modern facilities, a sophisticated simulation and data infrastructure and, as the F1-75 demonstrated, the ability to produce a genuinely excellent F1 car.

His job was to take those resources and turn them into a properly functioning championship operation. And that’s why I’m much less sympathetic to the argument that Ferrari simply needed several years to rebuild from the ground up. The foundations were already there when Vasseur arrived.

Join the original discussion here:

‘If you want to point fingers, point somewhere else’: Hamilton rubbishes Vasseur rumours

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