Ferrari offered advice on how to "keep morale up" after French fall from grace

Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz in action in France — Photo: © LAT Images

Ferrari

Ferrari offered advice on how to "keep morale up" after French fall from grace

Ferrari failed to score points for the first time this season

Ian Parkes

Wednesday 23 June 2021 16:55

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Former Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn has offered his advice on what he would do to maintain morale inside the Scuderia following a dispiriting French Grand Prix.

Brawn spent 10 years with Ferrari, helping it and Michael Schumacher dominate F1 from 1999 through to 2004 as the team won six consecutive constructors' titles and the German five successive drivers' championships.

Now in his role as F1's managing director motorsports, Brawn has conceded it was "a surprise to see Ferrari struggle" at the Paul Ricard circuit given its performances at the previous two races around the streets of Monaco and Baku.

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Ferrari went from polesitters at both circuits to zero points scorers in France as Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc finished a lowly 11th and 16th respectively due to extreme tyre issues.

"Their speed in qualifying was decent and I honestly don’t know where that went in the race," remarked Brawn.

"They will have to go away and work out what they got wrong as it is out of kilter with their recent performance. It was a very strange result but I’m sure they’ll come back."

Brawn draws on past Ferrari experience

Given his own dealings with the team, Brawn believes he has an understanding as to how it would now deal with what unfolded in France, and what would be the best course of action.

"In my experience, the members of the team, both at the track and the factory would like to have an understanding of what went wrong," added Brawn. "If you can give it to them, they can maintain their spirit.

"If you come back and say ‘Sorry about that, we don’t know what happened, let’s see what happens at the next race’ it will certainly not be what they want to hear.

"My response would be to say to staff ‘Give us a few days to work out what happened, we’ll regroup, try and give an insight into what the conclusions are and what we’re going to do about it’.

"It’s the first of a triple-header, so there are another two races on the bounce, and that makes it tricky.

"Most teams are experienced in having the odd really poor weekend. I expect Ferrari’s engineers to quietly sit down, work out why there was this loss and help the team understand it to keep morale up."