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F1 journalist Mark Hughes feels that Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna might have been responsible for the team's plight this season. The car produced by the Italian squad last season was an impressive piece of machinery. It was not only fast but proved quite successful at the start of the season.
This season, however, has been a different story as the team has found it hard to achieve any level of consistency with this car.
Talking about one of the reasons why this might have happened, Mark Hughes, in his recent column post-Spain on the motorsport magazine, revealed that the Ferrari's slow straight-line speed was a bone of contention for the CEO. While the car was great in corners. it was consistently slower on the straights as compared to Red Bull.
According to Mark, Ferrari was under direct orders from Vigna that the car needed to have strong straight-line speed, and that played a role in the struggles that the team faces right now. Touching on the team's struggles in Spain, Mark revealed,
“Fast corners are not the car’s forte. Last year they were but there was a deliberate trade-off of that for straight-line speed with this car. That seemed a questionable shift when they announced it at the launch and even more so now."
He added,
“There’s a story it was because the boss Benedetto Vigna didn’t like the idea that the Ferrari was always slower on the straight than the Red Bull last year, that it was ‘inappropriate’ for Ferrari’s image."
"For the team’s sake, one must hope that is not true, and that a crucial part of the technical concept has not been influenced by ‘image’. Regardless, because of where the Ferrari’s aero efficiencies are, around Barcelona its lap time does not respond as well to more wing than other cars.”
Ferrari predicted to do better in Canada
Hughes felt that the track layout in Canada is going to be much different from the one in Barcelona and hence the Italian team should be expected to do well. Talking about the team's prospects this weekend, he said,
“In Montreal, there is no high-speed corner demand, and as such its suspension can probably be run softer. Which might be expected to regain the car the great low-speed corner performance it showed in Baku and Miami. There’s every reason to believe it will be in much better shape in Canada than it was in Spain.”
It will be interesting to see how well the team does this weekend. The kind of challenge posed by Mercedes after its upgrades should be a lot. To add to this, Aston Martin are expected to bring a major upgrade to Canada. It will be very interesting to see how the weekend shapes up for the Maranello-based team.
