Ferrari team boss has no answers yet: 'Don't know what happened'

At Ferrari, all reliability problems were supposed to be a thing of the past, but already at the first Grand Prix of the season little of that proved true. Charles Leclerc stalled in Bahrain, missing out on a podium finish. Frederic Vasseur is dismayed that his formation has scored only 12 points.

"We don't know what has happened yet. We had an issue this morning, we changed a part. We don't know where it's coming from and we will have the investigation soon," Vasseur told GPblog in Bahrain. On Sunday morning, a problem was already identified and the Energy Store was replaced.

Ferrari too slow on Sunday

The Ferrari team boss summed up the situation as follows: "The qualifying pace we are there and matching Red Bull at least in Bahrain. That's a positive point. Now we have to be fully realistic. If we want to improve reliability is not at the level that we need if we want to win. We need to have a clean sheet at the weekends."

Furthermore, the high tyre degradation at the Italian team is also a concern. "Compared to Red Bull we were not in a good position, that is the clear picture today. This is our starting point and we have to do our best to improve the situation in the coming weeks," Vasseur told Sky's Italian branch.

While Red Bull chose to have Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez do two stints on softs, Carlos Sainz and Leclerc only did one run on the softs. It has everything to do with the fact that the SF23 burns tyres. "It would have been too optimistic for us to go twice on softs. Red Bull could afford it."