As Formula 1 enters a final triple-header that will decide the outcome of both championships, there is an inevitability that at its denouement will be a ton of regret from the losers.
That is perhaps more so when it comes to the constructors’ championship fight, since each of the three contenders can claim that they had in their hands the chance to win. McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull all know that big points were left on the table, which may well make all the difference in the end.
Someone as cool and calculating as Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur needs no reminding that, while a late surge means his team is still in contention heading to the Las Vegas GP, it was a costly spell in the middle of the campaign that may prove decisive in the final outcome.
From the joys of Charles Leclerc’s Monaco Grand Prix triumph that seemed to ramp up Ferrari’s title assault, it fell into a barren spell. There was the disastrous weekend in Canada, through to the bouncing woes that derailed the team's efforts through the Spain/Austria/Britain triple-header.
Those stumbles also coincided with the moment that McLaren stepped up the fight against Red Bull to completely change the complexity of the season.
Vasseur is clear that, if his team wants to become the best in the future, it cannot ignore what happened in that middle phase.
“For sure, my job if I want to improve the performance of the team is to understand where we were weak,” he said.
“We had Canada with reliability and delivery, and then we had a bad sequence from Spain, Austria, UK. There were these three races where we struggled a little bit with the upgrade, but we came back.”
The lost points
The impact of this spell could indeed be quite telling in the end, considering how narrow the margins are likely to be come Abu Dhabi. From Canada through to the British Grand Prix, Ferrari scored just 50 points. In comparison, Red Bull scored 97 and McLaren a whopping 111.
But while those mathematical swings are easy to plot in the standings, what is harder to comprehend is just how small the margins have been between the teams on track. Get one thing wrong these days, and it is the difference between victory and maybe even finishing outside the top six.
When you are talking about a matter of hundredths of a second of performance needing to be found week in, week out, that requires a level of detail and accuracy from a wind tunnel that has perhaps never needed to be relied on in the past.
“If you don't have the tools to be able to measure those hundredths of a second during a week of running in the wind tunnel, you are lost,” explained Vasseur. “If you have noise, and the noise is bigger than the reality of the development, you are lost.”
Dealing in such minuscule amounts of lap time that can make or break a weekend also poses other challenges – because the consequences in terms of position are magnified hugely if you are on the wrong side of those hundredths.
“The main issue is the pressure from outside,” Vasseur continued. “Because if you speak about lap time, we are speaking about almost nothing. And for almost nothing in Monza, I would say that we had Norris and then behind, in one tenth, there were four or five cars.
“Then if you have a look at the race between [Oscar] Piastri and Charles in Baku, probably one point of drag would have done the difference. We are really speaking about details.
“So the perception of the results from outside is completely different when you are P5 in Monza. If you are in P5 in Monza, it's a disaster; but when you are P1 we are the hero. And we are speaking about one tenth per lap.
“This sometimes is very difficult to manage internally, to stay focused, not to change drastically what you are doing when you are one tenth off. Sometimes it's just about details.”
The outside perception
While he is calm and collected about understanding these detail differences, there is an element that Vasseur needs to manage. That is the messaging inside the team, when the perception from outside is that things are going much worse.
“I have to say that I don't feel too much the pressure because I don't have Instagram, I don't have Twitter [now X],” he said. “I'm not watching the news, I'm not watching the race on TV because I'm on the pitwall.
“I'm not too permeable to the comments, but this is for me. The reality of the team is that you have 95% of the team watching the race on TV.
“It means that when Sky in Italy is saying that the team is doing terrible or whatever, or that we do a mistake, the perception of the employee of the team on the Monday morning is that we are in trouble. Sometimes it's just details, and it's where you have every single day to push on this kind of story.”
Details have clearly made the difference though, and Vasseur does not duck from the view that Ferrari had in its hands a car and an opportunity to win the world championship.
“Not all the season, but I think this was true for everybody,” he reflected. “But it's very, very tight and it's been that each time that someone is doing a step forward or backwards – it's changing completely the grid and the performance.”
The return of bouncing
Perhaps the most critical factor that influenced Ferrari’s campaign was the floor upgrade the team brought to the Spanish Grand Prix. While the design produced the theoretical gains in performance, it reintroduced the problem of high-speed bouncing – and that had knock-on consequences in hurting the confidence of Leclerc and Carlos Sainz.
Vasseur thinks that the team fell victim to the same problem that many other teams faced: designers hitting a ceiling in terms of finding performance with this current generation of cars, which exposes upgrades pushing cars over the limit into the world of porpoising.
“When you are developing – and it's true for everybody – that we are at the limit of the development of this car,” he said. “When we try to put more downforce, we are always going at the limit. And the limit is introducing bouncing quite often.
“Sometimes you can monitor it in the wind tunnel, sometimes not, and you are coming on track, and you discover some weakness on the upgrade. Also sometimes – and it's true the last two or three years – you need one or two races also to find the right set-up around your upgrade.
“But you have no other choice than to try to push and to develop, because if you stay where you are in Bahrain, you are dead also.”
A new mindset
Vasseur has spoken openly about his desire to see Ferrari be more open to risk and not be afraid to push the boundaries in the chase for increased performance.
But the attitude that he thinks helped Ferrari escape the malaise it found itself in with the Spanish floor was in acknowledging that things had gone wrong and a solution was needed – rather than a finger-pointing exercise.
“Where the reaction was good was to be very honest with yourself when we were in trouble,” he said. “It was to come back, and go to the wind tunnel; and not to say, ‘okay, that the upgrade is a good one, blah, blah, blah’. It was to be very strict on this.
“We had a very good direction as a team to sit down all together – the development, the aero, the track operation– to find the best compromise to come back in Budapest much stronger.”
This awakening attitude in the team, of working through problems and digging itself out of any holes, Vasseur thinks has laid strong foundations to do even better in 2025.
“Honestly, I think it's a good season,” he said. “For sure it's frustrating sometimes when you look at the end of the season or now and say: ‘okay, we were weak in this period or this period’.
“But if you go to McLaren, it's the same. If you go to Mercedes, it's the same. And everybody will say the same.
“Even Red Bull, they had ups and downs. But now we have to understand why we had downs and how we can improve. But even the reaction of the team for Monza was a good one on the development.
“I will always push on everybody in the team, but I have somehow a good feeling that it's not up to me to push always. It's also the mindset of the team to try to do a better job tomorrow than today. And I think we are [doing it].”
