Only a month and a half into his new role and Marco Mattiacci is already talking tough at Ferrari. The new team principal has gone on record saying his team needs to take a ‘long hard look at what it is doing’ following another set of disappointing results at Canadian Grand Prix this weekend.
In a weekend that saw Mercedes have a dismal performance by this season’s standard, both Fernando Alonso and Kimi Räikkönen could only manage to finish sixth and tenth respectively. Mattiacci had the following to say after this weekend’s results:
“The final result is definitely not satisfactory, far from it,” the team principal put bluntly
“I would ask the team to take a long hard look at what they are doing and work together, putting in maximum effort so that our drivers can fight for more ambitious results.”
Mattiacci later stated on Ferrari’s official website: “We are very angry with ourselves, but we have no intention of giving up. The Canadian circuit definitely didn’t suit us, given that it highlighted the strong points of some of our competitors and, on top of that, not everything went right either, given that we started from too far back and the others improved more than we did
“On the positive side of this weekend though, everyone wants to fight back, starting with our drivers, Kimi and Fernando, who are both extremely tenacious guys, competent and competitive and they know how to work as a team to point us in the direction of the areas that are a priority in our development programme.
“Some updates produced good results on track and that’s why we will continue down this path race by race.”
“We have improved since the start of the year, but every step forward we make must be looked at in the context of what our rivals have done,” he concluded with. “Ferrari has begun work on a specific approach, based around a few key figures; President [Luca Di] Montezemolo, James Allison, Fernando Alonso, Kimi Raikkonen and a group of highly talented engineers. It’s a case of restructuring the team, with people being given the best possible conditions in which to get the job done.”
“There is a clearly defined development programme that we are working through and which will see us bring updates to every race,” he added finally.
It remains to be seen how this new approach is affected with the confirmation that Adrian Newey is to stay put at Red Bull. Various sources have stated that Newey was a hairs breadth from joining the Italian marque only to be offered alternative projects by his current employer. Surely Newey was the cornerstone of any plans the Scuderia had going forward, and now that the design genius is no longer on his way it remains to be see if the prancing horse can gallop again?
