Vasseur: The difference in speeds is not as big as in 2022

As acknowledged by Ferrari, they had expected to be able to make up for the shortfall in straight line speed more this year compared to Red Bull Racing, but they failed to do so. The DRS system works very effectively on the RB19, giving the rival car a significant advantage.

A top speed benchmark shows the SF-23 is faster than last year’s Ferrari car, but Red Bull has made more progress.

“The DRS system on the Red Bull car has a kind of mega effect. He is more than any other team, – said Frederic Vasseur, head of the Scuderia. “And we need to understand how they manage to achieve this. Although the difference in speeds is probably not as big as last year.

We expected to be able to offset it a bit more, but the gap is not as big as before. But it is clear that we need to catch up in this area. Red Bull has found a different approach and now they are of course much more successful. But we intend to catch up with them.”

Edition The Race provides data that allows you to compare the speed of Red Bull and Ferrari in the first three stages of the season, and generally confirms the validity of what Vasser said. For example, a year ago, during qualifying in Bahrain, Ferrari cars were 6.6 km/h slower on the straights, and in 2023 they got even slightly faster – by 0.9 km/h.

But in Saudi Arabia, at 5 km / h, the SF-23 was still inferior to the RB19, in Australia – 5.4 km / h.

All this, of course, does not please the Italian team, because while working on the car for this year, Maranello shifted priorities and focused not on increasing speed in corners, but on maximum speed on straight lines. In addition, it has become more difficult for drivers to work with rubber, as Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz said.

As a result, the team that is upgrading the machine has to re-adjust the list of main tasks that need to be solved first. Fans can only hope that Frederic Vasseur’s optimism when he talks about his intention to overtake rivals is not without reason.