Ferrari boss Frederic Vasseur has denied the notion that last weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix showed that the team has been outdeveloped against its Formula 1 rivals.
The Italian marque began the season as Red Bull’s closest challenger with an overhauled SF-24 delivering two victories and nine podiums in the opening eight rounds.
However, Ferrari’s sublime start crashed to a halt in Canada as struggles with pace led to a double retirement, while the Scuderia sustained a subpar showing in Spain.
Despite bringing a sizeable upgrade package to Barcelona, Ferrari couldn’t maintain pace with its immediate rivals as Charles Leclerc was fifth and Carlos Sainz sixth.
However, Vasseur has claimed that the new parts worked as anticipated and highlighted how an intense development race ensures that potential gains are all relative.
Asked whether he was content with how the upgrades performed, Vasseur told media including Motorsport Week: “Yes, we are satisfied with the numbers that we get.
“First, everybody is improving. That means that it is not that because you bring something that you will do a jump in front.
“It is that if you don’t bring, you will do a jump backwards. And everybody is bringing parts now, each two or three events.
“Sometimes you have the list of what we are publishing, but it is just aero. Don’t forget that we are not developing just the aero.
“And then sometimes we need also one or two events before to get the best from the package that we have.
“We have a kind of convergence of performance today over the last 12 months.”
Vasseur has acknowledged it can take sides several rounds to unlock the true potential of upgrades and believes that will be the case as it targets incremental steps.
Pressed on whether the weak pace was down to not optimising the set-up, he retorted: “No, but perhaps we do a better usage of the car next week after one event.
“It was quite often the case for everybody last year that if you have a look on the performance, when every single team was bringing something, it was sometimes the race after that the performance was there. And it will be like this until the end also because we have a kind of asymptote of performance.
“And now all the packages are much smaller than it was 24 months ago. It means that we are into the delta.”
Leclerc and Sainz both insisted post-race that McLaren has moved ahead, but Vasseur contends that no side has made more progress than Ferrari since last season.
“McLaren, one year ago, they finished UK 25 seconds ahead of us,” he highlighted. “I’m not sure that the rate of development is much bigger than what we are doing.”
