Ferrari’s home weekend at Monza opens on Friday with the team principal already telling his own garage, and the wider paddock, that the mistakes of the last two races cannot happen again.
Fred Vasseur told Motorsport.com that Ferrari have improved substantially in the way they run a grand prix, but that the improvement counts for little if points continue to slip away in avoidable ways.
“Honestly, I think we made a huge step in terms of execution over the last two or three years.”
“But if you want to be the champion, you can’t leave points on the table.”
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In Budapest, both Ferrari drivers were caught for speeding in the pit lane during a Virtual Safety Car stop and each picked up a five-second penalty. Lewis Hamilton was pinged for being 0.1 km/h over the limit and dropped from fourth to fifth, while Charles Leclerc was handed the same penalty on top of a slow stop that curtailed his own podium chase.
A week ago at Zandvoort, Ferrari finished fourth and fifth as George Russell held them off the podium. Hamilton put the qualifying deficit down to a familiar problem with the SF-26 and the softer compound.
“We had to do two warm-up laps while the others only needed one,” Hamilton said after qualifying fifth.
“That’s because the tyres weren’t warming up enough, and we need to understand what happened.”
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Power unit variance down to a tenth or two
The Frenchman insisted that the harder-to-see side of Ferrari’s season, the raw performance ceiling, is moving in the right direction. In particular he pointed to the reduction in lap-to-lap variance from the new power unit rules, one of the SF-26’s biggest weaknesses at the start of the year.
“The power unit is the key. From one lap to the other you can still have a swing of performance. It’s much less than what we had in China or Australia, where we were sometimes losing four, five tenths. Now we are losing one or two,” he told Motorsport.com.
Ferrari sit second on 338 points, 87 behind Mercedes on 425, with McLaren third on 263 and Red Bull fourth on 189.
Aero and engine upgrades due at Monza
Ferrari are bringing aerodynamic upgrades and an enhanced power unit specification to Monza, where the low-drag layout has historically suited the car. The race weekend runs Friday through Sunday, with lights out at 3pm local time on 6 September.
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