The Downfall Of Ferrari
After a promising winter-break and a successful car launch, the opening races of the 2023 Formula 1 season have cast doubt on whether the Italian team is able to compete with Red Bull this season.
Ferrari is known as the sport’s most famous team. They are even able to look back on many world championships with various legendary drivers just like Michael Schumacher, Niki Lauda and Kimi Räikkönen. However, the Tifosi are now faced with the harsh reality that they haven’t had a serious chance at the title for 15 continuous seasons. Though it looked very promising at the start of the 2022 season, Ferrari were soon faced with the fact that their car wasn’t as good as they hoped it would be.
Reasons for the decreasing performance of the Ferrari F1–75 were the unreliable power unit on the one hand and the poor tire management on the other. But not only the car failed on the two drivers Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz. The team also seemed to struggle with their strategies and communication skills.
One solution to the bad performance was the replacement of Mattia Binotto, as he resigned at the end of last season making room for Frederic Vasseur as the new team principal.
As far as it seems, the issues of the last season haven’t been erased, since the Scuderia Ferrari had to take a serious 10-place grid penalty on the second race weekend for using more than his two allotted control electronics units for the season.
At this point of the season Ferrari’s car performance is behind that of Red Bull and Aston Martin, while Mercedes were ahead of them in Jeddah.
After a devastating result in Australia the team moved down to fourth place with Charles Leclerc only being able to finish one out of three races.
Fred Vasseur remains a positive attitude and claims:
“Today’s (Australian Grand Prix) result, not scoring points, does not reflect the progress we have made as a team.”
“And we now have three weeks to keep working on optimising and updating the SF-23 for the coming races.”
Ferrari’s performance and potential is way greater than their current points and standing indicates but in order to be successful in Formula One you have to score points.
