Ferrari boss Marco Mattiacci says he knows what direction the team needs to take in order to improve its prospects.
Mattiacci, who took over just before China, has spent the past two months finding his way into the job. He gave the assembled team his thoughts before the Austrian GP.
“After Canada it was important to get together and talk and to clear the air and to let them understand there is a clear direction that we want to take,” he explained. “And we have an understanding about which are our weaknesses, and there is a leadership that is working to fill up those weaknesses. In terms of the master plan or the strategic plan, I think the key points I would like to keep for ourselves. I would not give further advantage to our competitors.”
Meanwhile Mattiacci said that Luca di Montezemolo’s recent call for a meeting of interested parties to discuss F1’s future has been well received.
“There are a lot of teams that are aligning themselves to our position, that there is a need to improve the overall appeal of F1, and to have a broader audience for obvious reasons. I think those are the reactions that we wanted. I have attended the F1 Commission meeting and I think that letter, or those words, are having an affect. We have a lot of the teams that are on our same position.”
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Meanwhile Mattiacci said, “… there is a need to improve the overall appeal of F1…”
There will always be things that can change to make the F1 show “better”, but the fundamental problem with this season (if there is one, which I don’t necessarily agree with) is that teams like Ferrari, Mc!aren and Red Bull have not produced competitive cars. If Ferrari had fielded a car that could consistently challenge the Silver Arrows and win, LDM would not be complaining.
The Ferrari marque is story booked, but this current excuse searching approach to failure instead of sucking it up and saying we’ll get the car right next season is not worthy of Ferrari’s lineage.
While I think the sport needs all teams to be competitive, Including Ferrari, their lineage (dating back to Ill Commandetore himself) has always included “if you can’t win on track, manipulate circumstances off track” to gain competitive advantage.
LOL and true
Yes. I posted on another thread that a sure way to see how poorly the Scuderia is doing is by how they’ve ramped up on the politics.
The lack of a competative car is somewhat down to the current regulations, which simply don’t allow Ferrari (or Renault/Red Bull) to address the main weakness of this years car, the so called Power Unit.
Having a homoligated PU during the first year of the new units was pure stupidity on the part of everyone involved with the 2014 F1 regulations. The advantage of the Mercedes powered cars was locked in for the full season, and the sport is suffering the consequences.
They all have to work to the same set of regs!
Merc has just done a better job.
I cringe every time a team principal, FOM, or FiA executive start talking about making the show better. That usually means the teams will be forced to spend multi-millions on regulation changes while at the same time being told that the problem with F-1 is the cost. I was skeptical as to how Mattiacci would do, given his lack of experience, but he seems to be willing to say and do what needs to be done, and he has the advantage that he can clean house if he needs to and re organize in a way that will be effective.
Hopefully his house cleaning will see Luca cleaned right out.
Mattiacci knows that the Ferrari team principal’s job comes with an ejection seat that is not self activated. LOL