Vasseur faces conundrum: 'We've never had this problem'

Ferrari team boss Frederic Vasseur is keeping his spirits up despite the disappointing result at the Bahrain Grand Prix. Speaking to GPBlog and others, Vasseur says he is not immediately giving up hope just because the first race went badly.

The season started extremely badly for Ferrari. Charles Leclerc immediately saw Max Verstappen disappear on the horizon at the start. He might still have been able to compete with Perez for second place, were it not for the fact that his engine gave up mid-race. Carlos Sainz was third for a long time, but he was eventually overtaken by Fernando Alonso, allowing Ferrari to finish the first race without a podium finish.

"It's never good to start with a DNF and I would have preferred to finish like Red Bull for sure," Vasseur acknowledged. "I told the team two weeks ago that the championship won't be over in Bahrain, it doesn't matter the results in any case, and it was true for the winter test, it's true for today, that the team experienced the opposite situation in the past. The most important now is to be able to have a clear picture of the situation where we are failing and to do a proper analysis on this and to come back as strong as possible."

'We have never had this problem before'

Leclerc's failure was extraordinary: the engine just suddenly stopped working. Inside Ferrari's racing team, they still have no answers as to what happened. The team faces a big mystery, Vasseur explained.

"We never expected to have something like this because it's the first time that we had it. We didn't face the same issue at all during the 6 or 7,000 km that we did with the engines last week with the three teams. We never had the same issue on the dyno over the winter."