At the end of 2018, when Kimi Raikkonen signed to drive for Sauber, the team was on the rise.
After Charles Leclerc and Marcus Ericsson finished the final season of last season in the championship, the teams made regular visits to the points in 2018. By the end of the year, Raikkonen’s choice seemed to be confirmed: The team was fifth fastest in each of the last three races, in which only the inviolable “big three” from Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull are consistently ahead.
The team’s Alfa Romeo sponsorship deal became a full rebranding when Raikkonen arrived. With that, a world champion reunited with the team that gave him his F1 break and Ferrari power still under his right foot seemed geared towards killing giants.
It didn’t work out that way. The team led by Sauber was an inconspicuous eighth in the championship last year, and this year got off to a bad start. F1 has visited three circuits so far this year – two of them twice – and the Alfa Romeo-Ferrari C39s were each the slowest.
Team boss Frederic Vasseur was hired by the team owners Longbow Finance in mid-2017, who placed the team in the hands of a new company, Islero Investments AG, the following year. Despite his team’s drop in assets on the track and the pressure Covid-19 has put on the business, Vasseur believes future changes in the sport will help independent cadres like him become competitive again.
Alfa Romeo was hit by Ferrari’s loss of engine power. First, however, is the immediate concern about the team’s rearward slump and its causes. One thing is obvious: Alfa Romeo’s Ferrari powerplant isn’t as powerful as the one it enjoyed last year. Like Ferrari itself and Ferrari customer Haas, it is a deficit that hurts the team the most in qualifying.
“It’s a strange feeling because we are clearly missing the pace on Saturday and we are in a very difficult situation for qualifying,” said Vasseur RaceFans in an exclusive interview that took place after the first three races of the year.
“[But] We had a good recovery every time in the race with a decent race pace in every single event. Now we have to work as hell on qualifying mode because when you start from the back it’s quite difficult, sometimes even impossible, depending on the track and layout, to get back to the points.
“It’s also a challenge because almost everything in the car is frozen. It’s not easy to develop, but it’s a challenge.”
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This challenge may also be seen as a frustration, but Vasseur urges his engineers to focus their energies on areas where they can make a difference.
The team slipped to the back of the starting grid. “The engine part is out of our hands,” he says. “I want to focus on what I can control or improve.”
Vasseur has a point. While all three Ferrari-powered teams are less competitive than twelve months ago and often drive the same routes more slowly, Alfa Romeo has taken the biggest step backwards of the three. It is not just the aggregate that is to blame.
“We had a lot of internal discussions and I told the guys to forget the engine. It’s Ferrari business, they will do their best for themselves.
“Let’s focus on our side, on the chassis, on driving and internal collaboration, just to try to improve the package.
“It’s not just the engine, also in terms of qualification. That means we have to clean our door before we talk about the others. “
In the first three races, Vasseur believed the team “made a mistake because we overreacted … to try to make up for the lack of performance”.
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“I think we honestly didn’t do a good job and we need to fix it,” he explains. “The potential of the car is pretty difficult to see until we can create a perfect weekend.”
Giovinazzi has scored the only points this season. Creating a “perfect weekend” is difficult when your drivers line up in the back. But in Raikkonen and Antonio Giovinazzi they have the classic pairing of an established hand who knows all the tricks and a (relative) newbie who has everything to prove.
Raikkonen’s rough pace on one lap may not be what it was, but his consistency over a race is hard to fault. While Giovinazzi has more and more of him on Saturdays, Raikkonen’s racing pace is often shown on Sundays.
This was the case last weekend when the 2007 world champion was one of the few drivers who implemented a strategy from a single source. It paid off and he won five places in the race. But if you start last, you are only halfway to the points.
To do Giovinazzi justice, he had to play dutiful number two in the first two races of the season, letting Raikkonen overtake as the team struggled to maximize his score. Even so, ironically, Giovinazzi remains the team’s only scorer this year.
He was also noticeably reluctant to make room for Raikkonen in the second round. Even so, Vasseur is confident that his two drivers can rest assured that they will continue to play the team game upon request.
“The strategy for the team is very clear and we will stick to the strategy. Before the season started, we agreed on the strategy that if one car is faster than the other, mainly for tire reasons, we swap and then swap again on the last lap of the race if we can. We liked that in the past.
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“I did it – and I had some bad comments in the press – when we did it in Spielberg between Leclerc and Ericsson two years ago. But it’s our policy, the internal rules in the team and we will stick to the rule. “
Vasseur expects his drivers to play the team game. Given the team’s current level of performance, drivers need to be willing to respect the team’s tactics in order to have the best chance of scoring points, believes Vasseur.
“I don’t care if Antonio or Kimi leads the group of the team. We want to fight for the team. We have to collect points.
“We have to get into such a situation and be solid there and work together a lot more than in the good days. This situation will happen again and we will follow the internal rules of the team. “
Off the track, the team shares an identical challenge with all competitors: the effects of Covid-19. Vasseur is not drawn on the exact extent of the financial ramifications for the team, but says clearly, “The ramifications are enormous.”
After the first 10 races of the F1 season were canceled, Alfa Romeo looked for other ways to keep its sponsors informed.
“On a case-by-case basis, we had to discuss with the sponsors and try to come up with a new strategy that would help them get there with F1,” he says. “I think we’ve put a lot of effort overall with the drivers to do a lot more on social media, a lot more in terms of filming, and we’ve tried to compensate as much as possible.”
“I also perfectly understand that [sponsors] sometimes have problems in their own business and if we don’t deliver, we don’t, ”he adds. “But in all cases, to be honest, we had a very open discussion with our sponsor, whom we sat down, and found a solution to compensate, expand, modify. In all honesty, it happened very well and I’m more than happy with all of that [solutions] we have found so far.
Before the pandemic, Formula 1 had already confirmed plans to introduce a cost cap next year. Vasseur welcomes the subsequent decision to lower the initial spending limit from $ 175 million to $ 145 million, and then drop it by an additional $ 5 million over the next two seasons, to say the least.
“It was Christmas in March!” He grins when asked about the decision. “I think it’s a good step forward for F1.”
Vasseur “put a lot of energy” into the budget cap and makes it clear that he felt he was “the first target because of the crisis.” [cap] wasn’t enough “. He says that all teams” will struggle with the budget in the future “.
“The economy is changing and it won’t be easy for the next few months or years,” he says. “But I think the FIA and the FOM made the right decision to try to reduce the cost cap and step we took beyond the first objective – OK, some teams will think it’s too much , others are not enough – but as we are 10 teams from different regions with different structures and different budgets. You will never find a compromise. “
Is the team’s Alfa Romeo trademark here to stay? The 2021 F1 season will therefore be crucial for this team. Not only is this the first opportunity to show how competitive they can be under the new cost cap, but it’s also the final year of their branding deal with Alfa Romeo. Will the brand expand its engagement, especially given the current shape of the team?
“We’re partners in the project, it’s the title sponsor of the team,” says Vasseur. “You know very well that a project like this is a long-term project. They also know that you will get good and bad results and that we must work together and try to improve the situation.
“You can’t change the way you look at the project because you get a good result one day and a bad one during the week [after]. I think they know the business perfectly and they know full well that you can have hard times and good times. “
Vasseur assumes that discussions about a possible extension will begin “probably in the next few months”.
“They’ve also made some management changes and we need to take the time to do that,” he adds. “But to be honest, it’s a nice situation to have a long-term contract like the one we have.
“If I say conveniently, we can focus on the project and the development of the car and the development of the company, the structure of the company, and so on.
“I fully understand and I am fully aware that we need to get results. Everyone needs to get results on the grid. Nobody can be satisfied with bad results and we are the first to try to improve the situation. “
Raikkonen is still aiming for his first points for 2020. The year may have started badly in terms of overall performance, but the potential is clearly there. With the slowest car at a pure one-lap pace, Alfa Romeo is still ahead of Haas and Williams in the points table.
Vasseur is determined that they can build from there. “Reality is reality,” he says. “We have a performance deficit. We have to work on it.
“But frankly, this is the racing team’s life that you are always on the lookout for performance.”
2020 F1 season
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