Frédéric Vasseur is annoyed by the fact that the FIA took two months to release a technical directive for flexible wings. The Ferrari boss believes this had an impact on the outcome of the 2024 F1 season.
“I'm a little frustrated with this situation, because it's a clear performance and we're waiting two months to find out if it's legal or not” Vasseur explained. “And with the budget cap, you always have to keep costs in mind. That means you have to be efficient with the budget.”
“It means that if you start doing a development and in the end it's a failure, you burn 600,000 euros. We had this discussion with the Red Bull story two years ago: this is not the case. “It's not burning half a million, it's half a million out of 150 million.”
“It's half a million out of three or four million development, because you have your guys, you have the racing costs, you have this, this and that and at the end you have the development, and you have X million development.”
“But it's a small more than at the limit.”
The Frenchman was all the more annoyed as the flexible fins had an impact on performance even though the gaps were tight: “It’s true that the closer the competition, the more attentive we will be to details.”
“I'm not sure that when you have six tenths of a gap between the cars, we are so attentive to the details. But in races like Monza, where four or five cars were within a tenth of each other, the Having a flexible fin or something else makes a huge difference.”
“I think it's more the consequence of the fact that we have difficult regulations and it's not easy to develop, but also that the championship is getting tighter and tighter. We can't repeat the season. And it’s not the same approach.”
“One is something we knew about, and we're a little behind in deciding whether to adopt it. The other is a development, and we didn't expect to have this problem. With the spoiler, it's “It's just a mathematical approach.”
