Vasseur reveals why Ferrari managed to bounce back after a difficult series of weekends
On the back of Ferrari's best qualifying result at the Mexico City Grand Prix, the Scuderia's team boss Fred Vasseur revealed how the Italian team managed to turn things around following a series of tough races.
Following a strong display at last weekend’s United States Grand Prix, Ferrari seemingly managed to carry this form over to Mexico, crucially with both cars.
On the back of some strong lap times across the three practice sessions, Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton both arrived in Q3 with two fresh sets of soft tires and put them to good use.
The Monegasque grabbed provisional pole on the first runs with a staggering improvement. Although he managed to find even more time on his second hot lap, he did not have an answer to the pace of Lando Norris and had to settle for second place on the grid.
Lewis Hamilton sat out the opening practice as part of the requirement that forces each driver to hand over the car to a rookie driver twice across the season.
Despite missing FP1, the Briton managed to find a good setup for the unique requirement of the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez to back Leclerc up with his best Grand Prix Qualifying of the year.
Commenting on Ferrari's result in the Mexico GP qualifying, team boss Lewis Hamilton added: "It’s our best qualifying since the early part of the season and this one is particularly good as we were there right from Q1 and it’s very important to have Charles on the front row tomorrow. It is also important that Lewis is near the front as it is gives us more possibilities in terms of strategy.
"Our pace was decent in the last couple of races but we struggled to put everything together, while this weekend we have done a good job from the start on Friday.
"When you start off on the right foot, it is far easier to fine tune everything as the weekend goes on. In qualifying, with Charles we only ran one set of new tyres in Q1 and again one in Q2, while except for Lando, the others used two. It was always our plan to save one set of Softs for tomorrow.
"Can we win tomorrow? A lot will depend on the start and it’s a long run off the grid to Turn 1. The key will be the ability to run in clean air," concluded Vasseur.
