Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur addresses one mistake the team needs to avoid while trying to catch Red Bull

Ferrari boss Fred Vassuer stated that his team needs to avoid assuming that Red Bull has a silver bullet that gives them an automatic half second advantage over the competition.

The Italian outfit kicked off the new regulation era brilliantly in 2022 with Charles Leclerc winning 2 of the first 3 races. From that point onwards, Ferrari's fortunes started to unravel. As the 2022 F1 season progressed, it became more and more clear that the team was just not ready to win the title or even compete valiantly. The team's 2022 performance cost the then team principal Mattia Binotto his job.

The 2023 F1 season has been a whirlwind of changes at Ferrari with multiple personnel leaving the team and others joining. It was only near the end of the season that new team principal Fred Vasseur's real impact became apparent. This impact saw the team be a lot more competitive at the end of the season.

Looking ahead to 2024, Vasseur believed that the team needed to focus on working as a unit and making incremental progress. He didn't want the team to go down the path of finding a silver bullet to make substantiative gains. As quoted by PlanetF1, he said:

“I think the mistake would be to imagine that Red Bull, they have a magic bullet of five-tenths or that we made a step on something. The performance is coming from everywhere into the company, on the fact that we are able to produce parts quicker, on the fact we have better reliability."

He added:

“We gave up too many points this season for different reasons, for reliability, for disqualification in Austin, for impeding in qualy. This is clearly where we have to work. And we have to improve on aero, on engine, on every single topic. It’s not that we have something wrong and something good, and you fix something and you are making a step of four or five tenths."

Ferrari boss talks about the improvements made in the second half of the season

The Ferrari team principal touched on the improvements made by the team in the second half of the season where the car was far more predictable and in line with what the drivers would want. As a result, Charles Leclerc almost won the race in Las Vegas while Carlos Sainz also picked up the win in Singapore. He said:

“The most important thing is that the one thousand people we have in the team are convinced that they are all performance contributors, and they are all trying to push a little bit the limit, even if it’s for one thousandth of a second, which are enough then to do a huge step.”

He added:

“I’m more than pleased because between Zandvoort and today [Abu Dhabi], we didn’t change massively the car. We had an upgrade in Japan I think, but basically we kept the same car, and we were able to do a much better job with a better understanding of the car, better set-up of the car and a better approach from the drivers. It means that we have room for improvement everywhere, and this feeling is a good one to develop something for next year.”

Ferrari did start putting things together much better in the second half of the season and the team will be hoping to build on this moment for the 2024 F1 season.