Vasseur is confident for the Saudi Arabian GP, ​​but Leclerc already loses 10 places on the grid

Bad news comes even before starting the engines. He announces them Fred Vasseur before taking the flight that will take him to Jeddah: “Charles Leclerc will pay a penalty for replacing the ECU. The first had broken on Sunday morning, the second forced him to retire from the race. It’s a problem we’ve never had in the past and which we hope to have resolved now, but which unfortunately will cause us to lose positions on the starting grid on Sunday”.

At the second race of the season Ferrari will already lose 10 positions on the grid because the two ECUs granted for the season have already burned out. A bad blow on the fastest street circuit in the championship, a track where Charles could have exalted himself in qualifying, his specialty. How he took it you can imagine. By now the sampling of his angry faces is vast. “That Charles was angry after retiring is normal. The opposite would be worrying. That he got angry after knowing that he has to serve the penalty as well. But he never stops pushing the team in the right direction, motivating them. He was already with us at the factory on the Wednesday after Bahrain meeting all the mechanics to encourage them ”. Someone should then encourage him, but that’s another matter.

The Ferrari team principal tries to be positive. In half an hour of video call he gives a lot of laughs from him, of those that have already become a catchphrase of Crozza. He also tries to show us the full part of the glass: “We’ll bring developments to Jeddah and then to Australia and then we’ll go on bringing them to every race. Today we are not at Red Bull’s level in terms of race pace performance, but we are working to improve the car in terms of reliability and performance. I confirm what I said after Bahrain: the problem is not the concept of the car, the problem was just the performance. We have to work to extract its full potential, but what we saw on the track confirmed what we saw on the simulator. The correlation is there. We just have to work on it. Bahrain was a tough track, but not very representative. Things will go better in Jeddah, we will take a first step forward”.

Vasseur confirms Sanchez’s choice to leave the team. He reiterates that he is not worried and assures: “No key person will leave the team yet. Mekies I’ve known him for 25 years since he was still in school, he will be one of the pillars of the future organization. Simone Resta is working well at Haas with Gunther and it is not in our plans to bring him back. What has been there is a regular turnover as happens in every team between one season and the next”. The Team principal Ferrari man assures that he doesn’t feel the pressure that much (“It was worse in my first year at Sauber”) and that he wants to take it all in order to leave the team alone. He does not give lessons to those who criticize him (“Journalists are free to do their job as they want, it’s not up to me to tell them what to write”) and reiterates the goodness of his relationship with the managing director Vigna: “We have a continuous discussion between us, ours is a positive and constructive relationship”.