Frederic Vasseur Fires Warning to Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz as Ferrari Suffer From Stefano Domenicali’s Decision

Before the Chinese Grand Prix, Ferrari was clearly the second-fastest team on the grid. They had scored podiums in every other race including a race win at Albert Park with Carlos Sainz. And while Charles Leclerc hasn’t been in his top qualifying form early in the season, he has shown a strong race pace, too. However, the Sprint Weekend format in Shanghai didn’t suit the Ferrari’s. And this has gotten Frederic Vassuer concerned about the upcoming race in Miami.

The FOM (Formula One Management) has decided to turn the Miami Grand Prix into a Sprint Race Weekend for 2024. It will be the second of the six Sprint Weekends planned for the season. And Fred Vasseur doesn’t want a repeat of what happened in China. He has given a subtle warning to his two drivers to avoid the mistakes that cost them a good chunk of points.

With just one hour of practice for the whole weekend, Ferrari struggled to find a good balance on the SF-24. And that was evident in the qualifying results throughout the weekend. Neither Charles Leclerc nor Carlos Sainz could qualify better than P5 in the two qualifying sessions. The McLarens seemed to have a fair bit of pace advantage over the Ferraris over a single lap.

Even in the races, the best result for the Scuderia was only P4, secured by Charles Leclerc both in the Sprint and Grand Prix on Sunday. To add to their struggles, there were also some heated on-track battles between the two teammates during the weekend which, fortunately, didn’t end up in an incident. Speaking ahead of the Miami Grand Prix, team boss Frederic Vasseur highlighted the areas of improvement.

“Once again we are dealing with the Sprint format which gave us a hard time in China,” Vasseur noted, before adding, “But this is a very different type of circuit, on which we can exploit the data we acquired in over the last two seasons. We hope to do better than in Shanghai and I think we have the potential… Once again it will be important to make the most of the free practice session alone, especially to work on qualifying, where we have recently struggled more than we should have.”

With Lando Norris taking pole in Sprint Qualifying in China and finishing the Grand Prix in 2nd place, has McLaren jumped ahead of Ferrari?

Frederic Vasseur is not concerned with McLaren’s performance in China

The McLarens were comfortably ahead of the Ferraris throughout the Chinese Grand Prix weekend on both single-lap pace and the race pace. However, according to Vasseur, it happened because Ferrari failed to maximize their package because the margin between the two teams in extremely thin.

After the Grand Prix, when Vasseur was asked if Ferrari had fallen behind McLaren, he explained, “I think it’s a matter of a tenth or half a tenth (between the two teams). In Melbourne for example, after 60 laps we finished the race eight seconds in front. It’s more a matter of extracting the best of what we have… It’s not that the situation is changing massively from one weekend to the other one… I think it’s really a matter of putting everything together. We didn’t have a clean weekend on our side, but we made collectively too many mistakes.”

Will Ferrari make its way back onto the podium in Miami? Share your insights and predictions in the comments down below.