Vasseur hoping Ferrari got ‘all the s***** parts of the season' out of the way in Canada

Fred Vasseur is hoping that Ferrari suffered all of the toughest parts of their season in one weekend after a disastrous outing at the Canadian Grand Prix, with both drivers failing to make it into Q3 in Saturday’s qualifying before recording a double DNF in Sunday’s race.

For Charles Leclerc, the problems started almost immediately in the 70-lap encounter after his SF-24 began to experience an engine issue. He later took a gamble on an early switch to the slick tyres amid changing conditions, but the move did not work to his favour and he eventually retired on Lap 43.

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On the other side of the garage, Carlos Sainz struggled to make ground in the midfield and also collected damage after making contact with the Kick Sauber of Valtteri Bottas. He then suffered a spin in the latter stages, resulting in his car hitting Alex Albon’s Williams (see the clip below) before limping back to the pits where he also retired.

While the drivers had spoken of a lack of grip during Saturday, Vasseur admits that the team still had confidence in their pace for Sunday before things quickly unravelled.

“The pace was strong on Friday,” the Team Principal said after the race. “The conditions were tricky yesterday and I think a couple of cars had the same issue.

“But we were quite confident with the pace for today. At the beginning everything went wrong, and I hope that we put all the tough, s***** parts of the season on the same weekend!”

Asked if the weekend had been his toughest since taking the helm at Ferrari in the beginning of 2023, Vasseur reflected: “It was not the best one. The most difficult, I don’t know.

“Sometimes [you can] have the feeling that everything is going wrong and everything is going against you, but we won’t change our approach. We are working as a team with the drivers in the good and the bad moments, and we will keep the same approach for next weekend.

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“I’m not scared of this kind of weekend. It’s like it is, and it’s racing.”

In terms of how the drivers felt about the weekend, Leclerc was heard voicing his frustrations over the troubles with his car during the race, and Vasseur says he understands why the Monegasque reacted in this way.

“For sure for Charles when you are fighting in a group, you see that you are missing 10 or 15 kph and you have no chance to overtake, your engineers are telling you we are losing something like 80 horsepower, I can perfectly understand that the motivation is difficult to find in this kind of situation,” Vasseur explained.

“I perfectly understand the frustration. If he was not frustrated in these conditions, I would be worried.”

While Ferrari left Montreal empty-handed, it was a better weekend for some of their rivals; Mercedes hinted at significant progress by scoring their first podium of the season, while McLaren again looked to be in contention for a victory.

Despite missing out on this occasion, Vasseur believes that each team will have good and bad events throughout the remainder of the season, with Ferrari’s trying time in Canada coming just two weeks after Leclerc scored a long-awaited win in Monaco.

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“Last week it was a tough weekend for Red Bull, and this weekend it’s a tough weekend for us,” the team boss conceded. “We will have tough weekends, but we have to keep in mind that we still have 15 or 16 races to go. It’s almost a season of 2018 or 2017, doing 15 or 16 races a year.

“We have still a championship in front of us. For sure we’ll have tough weekends, we’ll have good weekends. The most important [thing] is to keep the same approach, to continue to develop and to continue to fix the issues.

"We are not world champions after a good weekend, and we are not nowhere after a tough weekend. We will be back in Spain and back into the pace.”