Frederic Vasseur: We can do better at Imola

In Miami, Charles Leclerc was on the podium for the third time this season and his teammate Carlos Sainz completed the top five – finishing fourth on track, but was fined for an incident with Oscar Piastri and given penalty seconds.

Leclerc is still third in the drivers’ standings, but Lando Norris’ win yesterday puts him level on points with Sainz – both now have 83 points. This success will certainly give new strength to both the McLaren driver and his team, but even if they continue to overtake Ferrari, Red Bull will still maintain a fairly confident lead in both championship standings. At least that’s what Frederic Vasseur thinks, although he is confident that the Milton Keynes team’s era of unmitigated dominance is over.

“To be honest, I think Red Bull is still in the lead,” said Frederic Vasseur, head of the Scuderia, after the race. – Max Verstappen probably could have won in Miami without this story with the safety car. That is why I prefer not to draw any conclusions from the weekend’s results for the time being. But with Max taking pole position on Saturday, this means that Red Bull still has the lead.

But it is also true that if we manage to do a good job and put everything together, we show good results. That is why we are increasing the pressure on Red Bull. They have to take this into account and are forced to use increasingly aggressive tactics. They are no longer in their comfort zone – unlike last year, when their lead was so big that they almost didn’t care how the conditions turned out.

Usually they took the lead after the first few laps, but now the picture is changing in my opinion. This opens up new opportunities for us in racing, and if we manage to take at least one more small step forward, we will really be able to force the leaders to fight at every stage of the championship.

We have been competing with McLaren from the very beginning of the season. In Melbourne they were able to get very close to us, but in other races they were quite competitive. Still, I would like to congratulate Lando Norris, who achieved his first victory in Formula 1. McLaren can also be congratulated. After the finish we all came up to Lando and congratulated him, we were all happy for him!

But we also did well: the SF-24 kept a good pace and we stayed quite close to Max throughout the race. We had a bit of bad luck with the safety car, but that happens in racing. We should take something positive from the events of the weekend, for example pay attention to the fact that we showed a good pace even though we had no technical innovations.

I am confident that we can have a better race in Imola than last weekend. We know that many teams are already actively upgrading their cars, but we are still ahead of most cars. The process of modernizing equipment no longer gives the same effect as before: with new products you can regain a few tenths, but we are not talking about seconds.

The McLaren team prepared a very large-scale series of updates for the Miami round, but the cars were not much faster than the others. I have no doubt that in Imola we will get even closer to the leaders and there we will try to fight for victory.

But I believe that the speed difference between the cars of different teams mainly varies from track to track and depending on the rubber compounds, and that the modernization of technology affects this to a lesser extent. However, the updates we will present at Imola will help us, although success will depend not only on this, but also on how effectively we work on the track.”

Source: F1 News

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