General
Seven months of Vasseur at Ferrari: is he satisfied with progress made?
- Sam Godber
The first half of the season is over, also for Frederic Vasseur. He came over from Alfa Romeo early this year as a replacement for departed team boss Mattia Binotto. After seven months in Maranello, Vasseur has a good idea of which way Ferrari should go, but how close is he to establishing the structure he envisaged?
Upon arrival, Vasseur immediately had a few goals in mind. In certain areas, Ferrari really needed to start improving to finally take another world title, Internal communication was one of the pillars where there was room for improvement. Meanwhile, Ferrari does a lot of things differently than before, but Vasseur also ran into setbacks in his first six months.
Chief engineer David Sanchez suddenly announced his departure after the opening weekend of Bahrain, and Laurent Mekies has now also left the Italian formation. Of necessity, things in the team's technical structure had to be adjusted again by shuffling other people.
Vasseur on new structure
In front of GPblog and others, Vasseur was asked if the structure of team has now formed in the way he envisaged when he started? "We are miles away because when you are doing my job, you don't have to imagine that there is a perfect structure, you need to be permanently in a forward disequilibrium, you know what I mean, that you always need to improve and always need to change things. If you stay with the same structure two years in a row that you are dead because all the others will improve, that it means that I don't have a clear picture to say I have to do this and full stop and it will work, that it would be stupid."
The Ferrari team boss cannot give a straightforward answer to that question. "We will make some changes in the coming weeks, in the coming months, in the coming years because some topics are a bit longer than some others but it's a permanent evolution and a permanent improvement." he explains.
Alpine team boss leaves
As a new team boss, it takes time to make your mark on a team. Otmar Szafnauer may not have had that time with a year and a half at Alpine. How does Vasseur view Szafnauer's situation and that of his former colleague Alan Permane. "I don't want to make any comment on what's happened to Alpine [...]. I know Permane and Otmar for a long time. They are professional, but I'm not into the team. I don't want to make any judgement. I was a bit surprised with the sequence of this, because that could have been done on Monday."