Vasseur: “The ADUO is not a magic wand, it takes time. Too focused on Mercedes, beating McLaren was possible”

F1 Austria, Ferrari shut down Years have passed since the Barcelona GP, not 15 days. The sparkling Red of Montmeló gave way to a dull and anonymous version of the SF-26, which got lost in the hills of Styria with a fifth and an eighth place. Ferrari leaves the Red Bull Ring shaken, with questions taking the place of certainties. What weighed above all was the speed deficit on the forehand, a limit known since the beginning of the season and on which the effects of the first ADUO token cannot yet manifest themselves; but today everything was missing, and Frederic Vasseur points this out. The French team principal does not make excuses for the Ducati’s lackluster performance, recognizing that an important part of the difficulties was the result of the unfortunate choices made by the wall on the strategic front in the race and the execution of the entire weekend. Vasseur’s words “In terms of the engine we have had a deficit since the beginning of the season, we knew and know that this is the situation. Even with the ADUO you can’t imagine having a magic wand to solve everything overnight. We will improve, but it will take some time and with the engine we need even more”, this is his comment to Sky Sport F1. “Aside from the performance deficit, in this case when you fight you have even more difficulty because you get overtaken on the straight. This, however, cannot be an excuse, because last week we managed to hit the target, it means that this weekend we didn’t put everything together. And this is a shame, I don’t think we had the pace to fight with the Mercedes, and we probably overreacted in the strategy. We pushed a little too much in the first part of the rubber, therefore destroying the tyres, putting too much attention on the Mercedes when not we had the pace to fight with them in these conditions. It was a mistake, if we had managed the race differently we could have been ahead of the McLarens.” “It was a difficult track for us, but we knew it in advance. In Barcelona there was more of a succession of fast corners, you are increasingly at the limit and this was better suited to our car. In any case, I wasn’t champion in Barcelona and today I’m not stupid,” he added. “Every weekend is a different story, with different conditions and different temperatures. Mercedes had suffered a bit last weekend, now they’re back to winning; the situation always changes because there are 6-7 cars in two tenths of a second, so it’s normal for there to be conditions that suit a car or an engine more. And this means that we’ll have to react at Silverstone, trying to understand what we didn’t do well this weekend: I don’t think we put everything together, starting from a Friday that I think was very poor on the part of We didn’t do long runs in good conditions and we paid the price today.”

Automobile Magazine – Formula1 English, News

2026-06-29 01:43:00