Missed opportunity or lesson learned? Vasseur on Ferrari’s up-and-down season

As Formula 1 enters a final triple-header that will decide the outcome of both championships, there is an inevitability that at its denouement will be a ton of regret from the losers.

That is perhaps more so when it comes to the constructors’ championship fight, because it is a battle where the three contenders can all lay claim that they had in their hands the chance to win.

McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull each know that big points were left on the table, which may well make all the difference in the end.

Someone as cool and calculating as Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur needs no reminding that, while a late surge means his team is still in contention as we head to the Las Vegas GP, it was a costly spell in the middle of the campaign that may well prove decisive in the final outcome.

From the joys of Charles Leclerc’s Monaco Grand Prix triumph that seemed to ramp up Ferrari’s title assault, it fell into a barren spell. There was the disastrous weekend in Canada, through to the bouncing woes that derailed the team’s efforts through the Spain/Austria/Britain triple-header.

Those stumbles also coincided with the moment that McLaren stepped up the fight against Red Bull to completely change the complexity of the season.

Vasseur is clear that, if his team wants to become the best in the future, it cannot ignore what happened in that middle phase.

“For sure, my job if I want to improve the performance of the team is to understand where we were weak,” he said.

“We had Canada with reliability and delivery, and then we had a bad sequence from Spain, Austria, UK. There were these three races where we struggled a little bit with the upgrade, but we came back.”

The lost points

The impact of this spell could indeed be quite telling in the end, considering how narrow the margins are likely to be come Abu Dhabi. From Canada through to the British Grand Prix, Ferrari scored just 50 points. In comparison, Red Bull scored 97 and McLaren a whopping 111.

But while those mathematical swings are easy to plot in the standings, what is harder to comprehend is just how small the margins have been between the teams on track over the remainder of the campaign.

Get one thing wrong these days, and it is the difference between victory and maybe even finishing outside the top six.

When you are talking about a matter of hundredths of a second of performance needing to be found…