Formula One news

Ferrari boss did expect more

You wouldn't normally think of Ferrari team principal Jean Todt as being an optimist. A realist, definitely, so his words of hope after his team's worst performance for many years in their home Grand Prix at Monza on Sunday should surely be taken seriously. 

Asked if he was concerned that tyre supplier Bridgestone, unable to find a competitive solution for most Grands Prix this year, might not find the answer during the coming off-season, Todt replied "concerned, yes, we are concerned. But I would prefer to answer this question at the end of the season. There is so much going on, that I still feel the possibility of finishing much stronger at the end of the season."

"Let's say we are not expecting a miracle to be in a better situation at Spa," he added. "But then it may rain, because it does happen very often but again, there have been so many races when it hasn't rained… Maybe Bridgestone was by far the best in a rain situation - not damp situation - a rain situation, but things may change. I don't know."

The solution will maybe come later, at the Brazilian Grand Prix in three weeks time. That may bolster attendance figures plus the presence of Rubens Barrichello and Felipe Massa, soon to be Ferrari drivers past and present. Certainly the crowd was poor at Monza, 20 percent down. Was Ferrari's poor performance to blame?

Todt couldn't sure. "Probably part of it. I don't know. I don't have any evidence that it's the only reason, but probably part of it, yes." But he admitted that they had hoped for better than the tenth and twelfth places in which they finished. "We were expecting better. And we are disappointed. Unfortunately the best we could have hoped for was finishing seventh of eighth."

But Todt says that "it's a job, at least as far as we see it. You never stop fighting. The day you stop fighting you do another job but as long as we will do this job we will fight and anyway, if we want to invest the current negative tendency you must not stop fighting. So every time, even by fighting, if you don't see it on the lap time, on the results, you learn something and by learning, you improve the situation. It takes more time than we wish it would take and more time than we thought it would take."

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