Wolff: Vasseur is the reason for Ferrari's improved form

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff praised Fred Vasseur’s work, claiming that Ferrari’s upturn in form can be attributed to the approach the Frenchman established at the Maranello-based squad.

Ferrari have enjoyed a much more promising season so far after a difficult 2023 campaign. The team went through key organisational tweaks with the most prominent change having been at arrival of Fred Vasseur.

The Frenchman initially refused to make changes as he was intent on discovering the potential issues that had held the Scuderia back. Vasseur started to make changes at the end of last year which included the promotion of a new chief strategist and a new race engineer for Charles Leclerc.

Having enjoyed a friendly relationship with the Frenchman, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff praised Vasseur’s input, claiming that his approach has been instrumental to Ferrari’s improvement.

"Fred and I have been friends since the early 2000s, when he was just setting up his Formula 3 team and I was looking after a few of these young drivers and we’ve gone back a long way and the friendship is tight and the trust is there, and nothing's going to change that, ever.

"We have a more intense rivalry, so there's a few things maybe which we don't share with each other anymore. We're both emotional people, so sometimes those emotions can boil up, but we understand each other, that we just have to do the best for our teams, and that may sometimes go against the other team. But that is the nature of the job.

"I think it would be wrong for me, and patronising, for me to say whether the job is good or not, that he’s done. From the outside, what I see is the team seems to be much more structured, a no bullshit approach.

"And Fréd has always been that. You can't tell him a story because he's going to see through it. And there is a reason why the team has started winning races and competing for a Constructors’ and Drivers’ World Championship.

Mercedes have made significant tweaks to their car in recent rounds, which helped the team close in on the field-leading trio of Ferrari, Red Bull and McLaren.

The team that has completely changed the concept of its car started the year off the pace. Interestingly, while race pace was Mercedes’ strength in the past two years, the W15 has struggled with tyre management in the opening stages of the season.

The upgrades have brought the W15 in a much better window both over a qualifying lap and in race trim.

Speaking of Mercedes’ upgrades, Wolff noted: “We brought parts, quite a bit to this race, but maybe not the visible ones. So I think in that fight, you need to add performance every single Grand Prix. And even if it's just a few milliseconds here and there, but we brought parts.

“In Formula 1, everybody jumps to a conclusion and says, I've seen that front wing and those side pods and those deflectors. Front wings play a big role today. It's clear. Aero elasticity plays a big role, but so do the floors.

“I think it's always the combination of these. You can have a front wing that flexes like a banana and passes the test, but the rest of the car just doesn't work properly in the interaction. I think everybody's trying to push the boundaries and within the regulations.

“And I think what we've been able to do over the last three races is particular on the right side, where we believe that we've made a big step and all of the aero bits that came since then, and maybe we've just been very much on the other end of where we should have been on wings and floors and all of that,” concluded Wolff.