Max Verstappen will fancy his chances of an F1 comeback at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix next time out as Ferrari have put off major performance upgrades before the race weekend. The decision suggests that Red Bull and the Prancing Horse will, once again, be closely-matched so long as the former manages to rectify their reliability issues.
Ferrari were dominant in Melbourne, their efforts spearheaded by runaway Drivers’ Championship leader Charles Leclerc who took the chequered flag more than 20 seconds before his nearest challenger. Verstappen qualified on the front row but was forced to pull over and abandon his race on Lap 38 with smoke billowing out of his Red Bull power unit.
That left him with significant ground to make up at this early stage of the season, but he has been offered hope by claims that Ferrari will not make significant performance upgrades ahead of the next race weekend at Imola.
The start of the year’s European stint is thought to present a perfect opportunity for teams to get cracking on developmental changes, but the fact that Imola hosts the season’s first sprint race weekend seems to have played havoc with Ferrari’s schedule.
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“I think it will be a difficult weekend in respect of bringing updates and trying to evaluate them in the Friday practice, because you need obviously to focus yourself on the quali of the afternoon,” said Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto. “If we will look at ourselves, there will not be much in Imola because again, we believe it will not be the right place.
“But we will try to mitigate the issues we have got still so far. I’m thinking of the porpoising and the bouncing that has affected our performance over the weekend. So we again try to work on that specific point. But, for the upgrades and more, let me say significant ones, it will be for later on in the season.”
After Binotto’s update, Verstappen can remain relatively calm in the knowledge that Ferrari and Red Bull will stay fairly close in terms of performance. While the Prancing Horse have thrown down a gauntlet to the rest of the field so far, Verstappen and team-mate Sergio Perez will naturally stand a much better chance of clawing back the deficit if their reliability issues are fixed.
Verstappen has been forced to retire in two of the three races so far this season, in Bahrain and Australia. The one race he managed to complete, in Saudi Arabia, he prevailed in a thrilling battle with Leclerc, but a 46-point gap makes for grim reading.
“We’re already miles behind, so I don’t even want to think about the championship fight at the moment,” said Verstappen. “It’s more important to finish races.
“We didn’t even finish the race, which is pretty frustrating and unacceptable. I knew there was a problem, and it was always going to be a case of trying to finish the race. But these kinds of things, if you want to fight for the title, cannot happen.”