The Ferrari team principal, Fred Vasseur, has dismissed the punishment given to Red Bull last season for overspending the budget cap as too light to have imposed a real penalty on the team.
With Red Bull already dominant in the 2023 Formula One season and Ferrari having endured a poor opening three races, Vasseur insisted he believed his team could bring their car up to pace to catch the championship leaders.
Last year Red Bull were found to have breached the £114m cap by £1.86m. They were given a £6.05m fine and a 10% reduction in aerodynamic testing. The reduction in testing was supposed to be a sporting impediment but Red Bull have emerged this season stronger than ever. They have three wins from three races and enjoy a 97-point lead over Ferrari in the constructors’ championship.
“It’s not a penalty,” he said. “Red Bull have done a good job but I am still convinced that the penalty was very light, that it should be severe given the rate of development we are doing this season and when you can spend what you are saving somewhere else.
“If you consider that you have an advantage at the beginning of the season because you spent more the year before, that’s a compensation. I don’t want to say they didn’t do a good job because they did a very good job on the car. I am not trying to find any excuses but if you ask me if the penalty is too light, I say ‘yes’.”
Vasseur was formerly the Alfa Romeo team principal and took over at Ferrari in January after Mattia Binotto stepped down and has faced a difficult opening to his tenure at the Scuderia. Charles Leclerc has suffered two DNFs from three races and took a grid penalty in Saudi Arabia from which he could come back to finish only seventh. His teammate, Carlos Sainz, finished fourth in Bahrain, sixth in Saudi Arabia and 12th in Australia, the latter after a grid penalty the team have appealed against with the FIA.
Having failed to match the pace of the Red Bull, especially in race trim, Leclerc has described it as the worst start to a season of his career. Ferrari changed the direction of development on their car between Saudi Arabia and Australia but Vasseur ruled out adopting an entirely new car design concept as Mercedes have chosen to do in an attempt to catch Red Bull.
“No, we are sticking to the plans,” he said. “We made some adjustments, it was much better in Melbourne and we will continue to update this car.
“Even Red Bull can’t say they have everything under control, it’s our business to do a better job every single race, to understand more and extract more from the potential of the car.”
The team have only 26 points in the constructors’ championship, in fourth place behind both Aston Martin and Mercedes. The stakes are high for Ferrari who have now gone 14 years without a constructors’ title and failure to do so this year would equal their record 15-year winless streak from 1984 to 1999. However, Vasseur maintained that the team remained upbeat about their chances of turning round their season.
“The mood in the team is incredibly good for the results we have,” he said. “Everybody is very focused and motivated, the drivers are very supportive and the mood is more than good. We don’t have the results that we were expecting but we are working to resolve the situation.”
