Former Ferrari engineer outlines the timeline when Fred Vasseur's impact could be felt within the team

Ferrari's former race engineer Rob Smedley recently analyzed when the changes made by Ferrari's new team boss, Frederic Vasseur, will start impacting the team. After the 2022 F1 season, Mattia Binotto left the Italian outfit, with Vasseur being appointed as the new team principal.

While many fans will be expecting the team to change slightly at the start of the 2023 F1 season, Smedley explained how it will take at least six months for all of these changes to take effect on the team's results:

"I've got a rule that you should be able to see good people who are effective and can just get on with it and are allowed and given the tools to be able to get on with it, you'll see changes within six months. So, you're not going to see anything instantaneously, because that would just be folly to expect that."

He further added:

"But certainly within six months, you can start to see the green shoots of the strategy that he's going to put in place. So I would say probably the middle of this season we're going to start to see differences."

Later on, Smedley outlined how a new team boss or any team member starts their journey with a brand new team. They initially meet new people and slowly get comfortable in the work environment before they start making changes to improve the team. Stating that these changes will finally come into effect after several months, he concluded:

"Your first month is just doing interviews and talking to the media, running around trying to learn five percent of the people's name that you meet. And then after that you can start to get a feel for the place; you can start to understand how the place works and then you can start to make changes after, say, three months, but the green shoots of those changes you're not going to see for another three months."

The changes made by Frederic Vasseur at Ferrari will certainly take a few months to come to fruition and will most likely impact the Italian team's results in the middle of the 2023 F1 season.

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Frederic Vasseur still believes that Ferrari can close the gap to Red Bull

At the moment, Red Bull looks extremely dominant in the 2023 F1 season, so much so that several teams and drivers have already accepted them as champions. However, Ferrari's new team principal, Frederic Vasseur, is still determined to close the gap to the Austrian-British team and fight for the top spot. When asked if the gap to Red Bull could be closed, he stated (via Formula 1.com):

“I think so; we have to continue to push. It’s not the right attitude to think about the gap and think about will we be able to close the gap and so on. We have to focus on ourselves, we know when we are weak and we have to improve on this one. We will see what is the outcome when we do a decent step. If you start to think about what could be the future potential with development, you are lost."

While it's good to see Vasseur maintain a winning mentality, it's safe to say that Ferrari will need to introduce massive upgrade packages for their car in order to get anywhere near Red Bull.