Ferrari CEO Fred Vasseur acknowledges that the Maranello team is having trouble understanding how to address the consistency issue that has plagued its Formula 1 vehicle.
At the Spanish GP, where Carlos Sainz qualified second, it was once again clear that the vehicle has consistently been quick over one lap.
With the car acting differently from stint to stint, the squad still has trouble in races.
Sainz dropped to fifth place at the finish line in Barcelona, while Charles Leclerc, who started from the pit lane due to qualifying troubles, was only able to finish 11th.
Both men had to deal with challenging vehicles.
Vasseur stated, “I don’t think the potential on the lap, or this kind of corner, or this other corner, is the biggest difficulty for us. “The consistency is the biggest problem.
“Charles’ car, for instance, had a balance issue between the first and third stints with the same compound. The third stint, however, was a little better.
“And Carlos, he did a good job in the first and last stints, but he fell behind the others by 15 to 20 seconds in the middle.”
Because the issue is never the same or the same, he continued, “It’s very difficult to understand and fix it.”
Vasseur stated that the issue wasn’t tyre deterioration in Spain.
“I don’t believe it was a tyre deg. If you exert further pressure, it can reach tyre deg. But that isn’t the major problem.
“Carlos was able to maintain a respectable pace for the final few laps. It indicates that we are not losing tyres. Charles began griping about the first stint’s balance on the first lap and continued to do so until the very end.
Vasseur also downplayed the idea that running in polluted air would be worse for the car.
The fact that you fly in free air during qualifying but not during races is also true.
Could be a possibility, but if you look at Carlos’ second tenure, he was also on free air, and it was a complete failure.
Vasseur acknowledged that the team needed to concentrate more on developing solutions to the consistency issue.
“Perhaps we can steer a little bit of the development on the consistency,” he suggested. “And to have something that is a little bit simpler to drive and that we can slightly steer. It’s the course we’ve been on for the past few weeks or months.
“And I believe that we have improved our consistency from earlier on. If there was something like this, you might say that it was always there, thus the problem is more than just on the chassis side; it is more from stint to stint.
But we did have some pretty challenging times in open air, like Carlos’ second stint.