The most difficult moment in Ferrari’s 2024 campaign also showed how much they have progressed under team principal Frederic Vasseur, driver Charles Leclerc believes.
“We’ve improved a lot and I think that has made the difference in recovering quicker whenever we get in those moments that are a bit more difficult to manage,” he said in response to a question from RaceFans when speaking to media on Wednesday.
While much attention has been focused on the arrival of megastar signing Lewis Hamilton, Leclerc is heading into his seventh season in the unique pressure cooker environment of Ferrari. He has never hidden his admiration for the calming influence Vasseur brought since he arrived at the team two years ago, and Leclerc says Ferrari is now in better shape than he ever knew it under predecessor Mattia Binotto.
“I am confident to say that it’s been the best team mentality that I’ve seen since I’ve been here,” he told media including RaceFans this week.
However Leclerc knows better than to build expectations too high. “I remember 2019 was my first day in Ferrari and I got there and I was so confident after the test because it went well and then I was so disappointed after the first race that I promised myself to not have any expectations going forward. So I don’t really have any expectations.
“But as a matter of fact, the mentality and where we are as a team is in a really good place at the moment. And of that, I’m very happy.”
“Competitiveness is very difficult to judge because I don’t know what McLaren or Red Bull might have found in their development progress, or Mercedes as well. So on that, we need to wait a little bit more. But mentality-wise and the way we work is at a very good level and on that I’m very happy.”
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Hamilton is not the only recent major signing to arrive at Ferrari from Mercedes. Vasseur also lured Jerome D’Ambrosio to serve as his deputy, while Loic Serra will head up work on the chassis as technical director. Leclerc says both bring the same calming influence which he sees as a classic Vasseur trait.
“What I really like about them is that they are very similar to Fred in the way they process emotions, which is a good thing,” he said. “You speak to Fred, you speak to Jerome, you speak to Loic and you get the same feeling.
“That’s a very good thing because it’s a big team so not everybody speaks with Fred and not everybody speaks with Jerome, not everybody speaks to Loic. But all three together speak with a lot of people within Ferrari and to have the same vibe and the same feeling out of Loic, Jerome and Fred is a very important thing.
“They manage emotions very, very well, and in a team like Ferrari where emotions can run extremely high, I’ve always said it’s a great thing.”
Ferrari was not the only team which encountered problems with its car development last year – Red Bull, Mercedes and most teams hit trouble at times. But Leclerc says the calmness Vasseur has instilled means they respond more effectively to setbacks.
This is particularly important as chasing lap time with the current generation of ground effect cars has become increasingly difficult, as Leclerc explained.
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“I think that it’s embedded in this new regulation of cars,” he said. “We obviously tend to drive these cars very, very low to the ground, which we are touching a lot. And whenever you touch [the ground]… it’s very, very difficult to reproduce the bottoming in wind tunnel or CFD. So that makes it particularly difficult for this generation of cars.
“That creates a lot of the problems that sometimes you see teams that did not expect any of what’s happening on-track to happen. Maybe there are ways to predict it in a better way, we’ve worked on those ways as much as possible, but obviously whenever this happens it’s because there’s something that you didn’t predict that happened and that might happen again.
“In those cases, I think the approach to solving the problem is super-important. I think we became much more solid at it and that comes back to the team mentality and the way we approach problems and the emotion management within teams. We’ve improved a lot and I think that has made the difference in recovering quicker whenever we get in those moments that are a bit more difficult to manage.”
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Heading into the new season, Ferrari faces a different challenge compared to 12 months ago, says Leclerc, as their previous car was not weak in any specific area at the end of last season. “At the end of 2023, I think it was very clear which characteristics of the car we wanted to tackle, because there were some issues that were very clear that we had to change.
“In 2024 it was a very different situation because I think the car was a very healthy one in general. Just when we had the upgrade problem there were some things that we wanted to change. But after that we had a very good car, we just needed more performance. So that’s where we focussed really for this new car, to do small steps in every single thing and not focus in one particular thing.”
Having only had a preliminary shakedown run with its new car on Wednesday, Leclerc said the team will have to wait and see whether the changes to it, such as the new front pull-rod suspension, work as intended.
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“It’s very difficult to feel that on a Thursday on a track like Fiorano with such cold conditions,” he said. “We will most likely see a lot more in Bahrain.
“However, the scope of a day like this is to first of all see the first numbers, to see if there’s nothing standing out. The first feeling, to see if there’s nothing standing out in a negative way, obviously. And nothing is coming out from that so that means it’s a positive first day. But more than that, it’s very difficult to say.”
Avoiding the kind of development problems which struck last year is just one area where the team must improve, says Leclerc. “Another one was the fact that we were just not competitive enough for too much, for too big of a part of the season,” he explained.
“We need to rectify that and start this new season on a better foot and to be on par at least with the guys in the front in order to fight straight away from the beginning of the season. Our season was a very, very solid one, but we were just not fast enough in the first half.”
But he is encouraged by the potential he sees at the team, and believes Hamilton has chosen the right time to join them.
“In order for us to win the world championship, we definitely need to start these first races straight away on top or at least fighting with the others,” said Leclerc. “But we’ve done a really, really good job in the second half of the season. We’ve been working really well and I hope we can use this momentum in order to to start strong this year. Let’s see how it goes.”
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