FIA Team Principals press conference – Italy

TEAM REPRESENTATIVES
Laurent MEKIES (Red Bull Racing), Frédéric VASSEUR (Ferrari), Ayao KOMATSU (Haas)

Q: Fred, please, if we could start with you. It feels like it's been a bit of a roller coaster of a week for Ferrari. On the evidence of FP1, just what is the mood in the camp at this stage?

Fred VASSEUR: Well, the mood is positive, honestly. Even if we had a tough weekend last week in Zandvoort – at least a tough Friday – but the recovery was good. Even if the race was a double DNF at the end, we left with not a positive number of points, but at least a positive mood and positive approach, with the feeling that we recovered during the weekend. The other advantage is that you don’t have to wait too much for Monza. It meant that from Monday morning, we were already in Monza. The mood in general is very good, and we had a positive push from the Tifosi all week, from Monday morning in front of the factory. This is an extra energy and a good one.

Q: Tell us about FP1. It couldn't have started better. Just how confident are you of staying at the sharp end for the rest of the weekend?

FV: With the experience of the season and of the couple of seasons I did, you don't have to draw any conclusions after FP1 – hopefully, because last weekend, we were last. It means there's still a long way until the end of quali and even more until the end of the race. We have to stay focused on ourselves, to try to continue to improve the car and the driving, and to try to get the best from what we have. But I will never draw any conclusions after FP1.

Q: Fred, you said in an interview this week that you want the team to win races in the second half of this season. Where do your best opportunities lie? What kind of racetrack?

FV: I think nobody expected that we could do the pole position – me, the first – in Budapest. We know that the fight is very tight, that we have four teams and perhaps sometimes more able to fight for pole position. For sure, McLaren is one step ahead, but it's very difficult for everybody to be consistent. We can have days where they are a step back, and on those days we have to be there. I don’t want to say this one or that one – we have to perform everywhere and get the best from what we have.

Q: Fred, final one from me. I don't know if you're a student of history, but the team is celebrating Niki Lauda’s first world title in 1975. Can we get your thoughts on Niki? Did you admire him? What did you admire about him if you did?

FV: Niki was a multifaceted guy. I was a fan when I was young, when he won the championship in ’75, ’77, and even ’84. I was a fan. Then I had the mega chance to work next to him when I was doing DTM and then later in F1. I think it’s a privilege because it was someone who was performant everywhere– as a driver, team principal, or whatever position – and also into the business. I think he’s an iconic guy.

Q: Laurent, if we could come to you now. This wasn’t such an easy race for Red Bull last year. How confident are you of having a better run this time around?

Laurent MEKIES: We are not normally in excess of confidence after FP1. You're right, last year was probably one of the most difficult races of the season for us. As much as nobody likes this sort of race where you end up underperforming or hitting issues you’re not expecting – as we did last year here in Monza –– it’s always the best way to progress. It’s always the best way to unlock more in your understanding. So it’s an important weekend for us to see, 12 months later, how much we’ve gone around the specific issues we had last year here. Too early to respond to that after only FP1, but it’s something we have well present in our head – what happened last year here.

Q: Just what was Max saying after the session? Does he feel that the car is born well for this type of track this year?

LM: You know, he doesn't feel a fundamental difference from what the characteristics have been all year. Even here, with a lower level of downforce, he found again the same characteristics, the same limitations that we’ve been pretty much dealing with with this car this season. However, are we visibly running into the same sort of additional issues as last year? It doesn’t seem to be the case, but again, it’s super early days, with only FP1.

Q: You've been in the new job for, what is it, a couple of months? Tell us where your focus has been in that time. What have you learned?

LM: The real focus has been – a) we don’t want to underestimate how long it takes to truly know a team and a company. It doesn't happen in one or two months. So the focus, as we said already in Spa, has been: let’s try to meet as many people as possible. Let’s try to get an understanding. Of course, now six weeks have passed, so it’s a bit better than Spa. Every day, you understand a bit better how the team is working. Every day, you meet more people, start building an understanding about the flows and the structure. Now, what we’re trying to do with the team is to map together what we need to unlock next to go back to an even more competitive scenario. That’s where the focus is now. The first phase was observation only; now the second phase is building with the team a map of what we need to unlock, to unlock more.

Q: Laurent, how different is the job of team principal at Red Bull Racing compared to what you were doing before at RB?

LM: I think I had given you that type of answer a few months ago, when wearing the Visa Cash App Racing Bulls colours. It’s very easy to underestimate how extreme you need to go with the car – and therefore with a team, with a company – when you look for ultimate performance. You find a team trying to extremise every aspect of the car and every aspect of the company to try to get that last bit of lap time. Of course, it’s not a high return on investment – it’s a lot of effort for that last bit. But that’s what top teams are about. Every race weekend, you have a very simple answer to your weekend: did you win or not? We got this P2 in Zandvoort. We got lucky—or rather, Lando got unlucky with what happened there—but that’s the only question you ask yourself on Monday morning: what were we missing? I guess in terms of mindset that’s the biggest difference between the midfield and what’s happening at the front is that you’re targeting ultimate performance. Until you reach it, the answer is that you didn’t do everything you could.

Q: Ayao, can we talk about Zandvoort first of all—double points finish. Given where you started that race, how much of a surprise was the end result?

Ayao KOMATSU: Yeah. Obviously, end result—it’s very difficult to control yourself. After we didn’t maximise our potential in qualifying, our mindset was: what can we do from P18, pit lane, to put ourselves in the best position? If the chance comes along, we can score points. That was the obvious choice for us. The message after qualifying was that… Up until qualifying, we showed some speed—very good speed in FP3 and Q1 Run 1. So we knew we had the car and the drivers to do it, but we had to put everything together, and we didn’t do that as a team from Friday to qualifying. We said, “Sunday, we cannot give up.” We start from the back, but every single lap we need to focus and trying to think how to get the result out of this race. After the race, I was really happy. Communication in the race was good, everyone worked together, supported each other, focus was there. Both drivers – I cannot fault them. We asked them to do certain things to help each other, and they did it. Execution was great. That’s what I was looking for, and that’s what we delivered on Sunday.

Q: This is a pattern we’ve seen from Haas before this year – battling from the back of the grid. I think of Ollie in Bahrain, for example, going from 20th to 10th. How much of that success is down to the operational changes you made in the garage over the winter?

AK: I don’t want to be too negative, but unfortunately I have to look at it the other way. When we start from the back but produce a result on Sunday, it quite often means we didn’t maximise the potential on Saturday. In Bahrain, we didn’t perform as a team in qualifying. We knew we had good speed there. We knew Ollie could do it – same with Esteban. In terms of operationally, yes, we changed the trackside team quite a lot this year. We knew it would take time to get performance out of everyone, and we’re still doing that. But we wanted to do it this year rather than next year, when there’s a huge regulation change. When we perform on Sunday, we’ve got to do that every session. We communicate very well together, and I think we’re all aligned inside the team. This weekend, everyone is very focused from lap one, FP1, on how to get everything out of the car and driver.

QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR

Q: (Fred Ferret – L’Equipe) Question to Fred Vasseur. How important is it as a Team Principal to bring confidence to Lewis before Monza, if he needs some?

FV: It's not just for Lewis. It's true, I think, for everybody that confidence is key in our business. He's coming after two or three difficult weekends, for different reasons, but it’s always key to bring back confidence to someone. I think that was part of the contribution from the Tifosi all over the week in Milan.

Q: (Ian Parkes – RacingNews365.com) Question for Laurent. Speaking with Isack yesterday in his media session, he’s clearly a driver high on confidence. He has, however, made it clear that should Red Bull be considering another driver change this season, he does not want that to be the case. If you are going to promote him, he wants it to be at the start of next season. Is that your thinking as well – that Yuki’s got the seat for the rest of the season, and if there is to be another driver changed it will only be over the winter?

LM: I think the short answer is yes. We made it very clear, very public, that we have time with our driver decision. We have enough drivers between the driver programmes to cover quite a few scenarios for next year, and we don’t have real reasons to rush into decisions. To your point – no, we do not plan to change during the season. Yuki has been making a good step in the last three races. We all want more, but he’s doing a good job. He was, for the first time, back in the points after seven races in Zandvoort. He was close enough to Max in Budapest, and had his best qualifying with the team in Spa. So he’s on a positive trend. It’s obviously extremely nice to watch Isack’s progress in the Racing Bulls car. To see him performing at the level he did in the last race was a fantastic demonstration of how much progress he's made this season. But really, we are relaxed about the driver topic, because fundamentally we have all our cards on the Red Bull side, and we can take a few more weeks – or months – to decide. Of course, that doesn’t mean we have to wait until the last race to decide, because we respect that it might impact our drivers one way or another. But for sure, we feel we have time right now.

Q: (Jon Noble – The Race) This is to Laurent and Fred, because I asked Ayao this question yesterday. There's an FIA meeting next week with fuel suppliers to discuss the problem of rising costs into next year, and whether something can be done for ’27. How big a headache is increasing cost for next season? How important is it that something is done for the following year?

LM: Completely different regulations. It’s going to be a breakthrough in terms of technology. That’s what matters right now. It’s a breakthrough because it's the first time the sport will run on 100% sustainable fuel. It’s going to be an incredible challenge for all the fuel manufacturers, all the PU manufacturers, to extract as much performance as possible from that sustainable fuel. There will be a cost layer at this stage or another, but at the moment it’s coming well after the considerations about getting a fuel that meets these very high requirements, and getting maximum performance out of it.

FV: I think we don’t have to underestimate the challenge of going to 100% sustainable fuel. It’s a huge step forward for F1 and a new direction we are taking. Honestly, the fuel is not yet frozen, which means it’s difficult to know the exact cost for next year. For sure, it's a bit more than the current season. But this meeting is more for the mid-term and long-term – to try to see how we can adapt the regulation in the future to keep things under control. But we must not underestimate the benefit of sustainable fuel. Yes, it has a cost – but it's a huge step forward for F1.

Q: (Ronald Vording – Motorsport.com) This is another one for Laurent. Last week in a special Dutch media session, Toto Wolff said that Red Bull has a ‘Mount Everest’ to climb with its own power unit project. What’s your impression since coming in of how the PU project is progressing? And secondly, how confident are you that you won’t have a significant handicap on the PU side next year, also given there's a safety net, at least for the ICE, in the FIA regulations?

LM: I think Toto is right by saying it’s an Everest to climb. That’s what it is. It’s as crazy as it gets to take the decision to do your own power unit, as Red Bull has done. It's an unbelievable challenge to be associated with. It’s the sort of crazy stuff Red Bull does – so it’s a good feeling. But we don’t underestimate how crazy it is. These guys have been doing it for 90 years or something like that. So it would be silly from our side to think we're going to come here and, right from the start, be at Ferrari’s or Mercedes’ level. That would be silly. But it’s being set up the Red Bull way – at the maximum possible level. We take it step by step. We are trying to ramp up as quickly as possible – both the PU and the structure that goes around the PU: the people, the infrastructure. Then, as I said, we expect a year with a lot of hard work, a lot of sleepless nights next year to try to get to the right level. But it’s a challenge that very much feels like a Red Bull challenge, and we love that. We’re not going to put a number on where we think we’ll be – because I don’t think anybody has a number – but we know we’re starting with a mountain to climb, as Toto said.

Q: (Luke Smith – The Athletic) This question is for Laurent and Fred, carrying on the engine theme. We're about to say farewell to this generation of power units. How do you think the engines that came in in 2014 will be remembered in F1? Have they achieved the aims that were set out? Do you think it’ll be a positive legacy?

LM: Please tell me if I misunderstood the question, but I think you're asking about the legacy of this engine generation. I think this generation of engines –the ones we currently have… It is and will remain the highest-efficiency engines on the planet. As much as these power units have had their fair share of criticism, that’s what they are. As engineers, it still amazes us – to get above 50% efficiency on an ICE plus hybrid is incredible. Technologically, these engines are amazing. They gave us great racing. Of course, we probably all underestimated the level of complexity they would eventually reach, but that’s also what Formula 1 is about. We now have another huge challenge with the 2026 regs, that’s exciting again lots of speculation – the sustainable fuel, the energy balance. But that’s what F1 is here for.

FV: Not so much to add. It’s true the perception is probably completely different between 2014 and today. Today, we have huge convergence of performance—it’s not anymore a huge performance gap anymore. We have everybody into the ballpark. That was not the case in 2014. It’s a good thing in F1 that we have this kind of continuity in development and convergence of performance. In terms of technology, we’ve reached a very high point today with this engine. But we have to keep the cost under control and avoid arrogance. As F1 in general, you are there for a couple of years now, and you saw seen the ups and downs in the F1. It’s not because we’re successful today that we don’t have to be careful about keeping things under control.

Q: (Diletta Colombo – AutoMoto.it) Question for Fred. You mentioned before the extra love and support from the fans since the beginning of your home race weekend. But how much extra pressure does it put on the team, and how do you manage it internally?

FV: Honestly, I’m just taking the positive. I’m not masochistic, but we have to take it like this. Even when we’ve had tough journeys during the season or last season, the fans were always supportive, always positive with us. And this is a mega good feeling. We were speaking before about confidence and how to give confidence to the drivers. Trust me, when they are in front of the crowd in Milano and you have thousands and thousands of people pushing for the team, this is a mega-huge push in terms of self-confidence. We have to take it like this. I’ve been racing for 35 years, and it doesn’t matter if it’s F1 or Formula Renault, I was already putting a lot of pressure on myself in Formula Renault, you know? So we have to be focused on ourselves and try to do our job. The pressure, as you're calling it, I think for me, it's more a positive one. And yeah, I’m thinking positively at least.

Q: (Leonid Kliuev – GrandePremio.com.br) Question for all three. McLaren replaced engines in both cars this weekend, supposedly installing older ones as we understand. Do you think we are approaching the first penalties for exceeding the limit, and what’s your situation regarding that?

AK: Power unit penalties – we took one with Ollie in Zandvoort. We knew we had to take a fifth PU at some stage, so we decided to do it there, since we qualified very poorly. Then we managed to come through to P6, so that was good. Esteban’s side – at the moment we’re not expecting to have to introduce an extra engine at the moment.

FV: No, we are very easy on the engine. It’s not because we are not declaring an engine that sometimes you can’t declare two engines in the same weekend before and use one of them later in the season. But we are on the safe side with the engine.

LM: I could say that I don’t know yet—but no. Seriously, I think we are reasonably okay. Obviously, we put a new one in with Max this weekend, and like Ayao, we had done a strategic change with Yuki a couple of races ago. So I trust, and I hope that we’ll be okay.

Q: (Jake Boxall-Legge – Autosport) A question for all three, please. We’ve kind of said goodbye to these engines, but what about these cars in particular? They had a bit of a flawed process at the beginning with porpoising and so on. What have been the main low-hanging fruits in development over the last four years? And do you think they’ve fulfilled the brief that F1 set out—with greater overtaking?

LM: I think if you ask Stefano, he’ll probably remind you that we were all criticising these cars before they came out. And in the end, we got incredible racing. I was in the ‘bad guys’ group—we were all thinking that the cars would all be the same, that there would be too much standardisation, and that performance levels would be too close. It turned out not to be exactly true. We got four years of incredible competition. Up to now, you still have one team dominating, and another team has been dominating in the past. So I think, when you combine that with the fact that these cars are the fastest ever, or nearly so, I think they’ve given us quite a great show. We’ve seen a lot of overtaking this year. So personally, I feel good about these cars. They brought something great to Formula 1 – technologically very advanced. It was a challenge for everyone. The ground effect cars caught nearly all the teams out in 2022, with the bouncing and everything. I think we had a great show. And combined with this engine, I think it raised the bar to a very high level.

FV: And don’t forget, in Budapest, we had four different teams, six cars, I think within less than one-tenth. That’s proper racing. For sure, McLaren is dominating – I’m not stupid – but they’re a step ahead. Also probably a bit in tyre management and so on. But I think we’ve reached a point where we have a proper fight today. And don’t forget also that we developed this generation of cars under the cost cap—it’s the first generation under cost cap. That means we have to take the positives from the last four years. We’ve had different winners, different teams able to win races, and from my point of view, it’s been a good show and good sport.

AK: Yeah, I think it just demonstrates how amazing this sport is. Within four years—like Fred said—in 2014, some people couldn’t even do a single lap. Then came 2022, with ground effect cars—again, most teams had huge issues. But how quickly we dealt with that, how quickly we converged. So both on the PU side and the chassis/aero side, we proved something. I think it showcases what’s amazing about F1. And next year’s regulations are going to change both PU and aero. That’s a huge, huge challenge. I think you’ll see a very different landscape to start off with, but again, I’m pretty sure you’ll see this paddock—these 11 teams—quickly find solutions.

Q: (Adam Cooper – Adam Cooper and Associates) Question for Fred. How much frustration was there around Lewis’ penalty and the fact that it carried over? Maybe the other guys have a view on the timing and the way that scenario unfolded.

FV: Frustration—I’m not sure that’s the right word. For sure, we were a bit disappointed. Honestly, I don’t know if it was too harsh or not. But from Sunday evening in Zandvoort, my decision was to be focused on Monza and not to spend energy or whatever to fight this. That was my phone... The frustration with the decision came also because—you have to slow down, yes—but it’s subjective. It’s not black or white. It’s not “you have to be at the pit lane.” It’s someone deciding if you slowed enough or not. And depending on the person making the decision, it will be different. But it is what it is. We decided to focus on the weekend and not lose energy on other projects.