Ferrari Sets Sights on Double Crown, Says Vasseur

Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur has declared a “very positive” vibe within the Scuderia as pre-season testing wrapped in Bahrain, eyeing both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships for 2025.

Charles Leclerc led the timesheets in Friday’s morning session, with Lewis Hamilton taking over for the afternoon, finishing sixth—Leclerc’s earlier lap landing him ninth overall.

Weather swings muddied the three-day test, prompting Vasseur to caution: “It has been hard to get a clear read on the overall situation here in Bahrain, as the conditions were changing quite a lot day by day and from the morning to the afternoon, so it was more similar to Vegas than to the Bahrain we usually know.”

He added: “Over the past six months, we have worked very hard on this car and have made a good improvement, but we will have to wait until we are all on track in Melbourne to understand where we are. If we look at the hierarchy of previous years, what we saw here was not the same as in qualifying a week later, under the same conditions. We will go from 10-15 degrees on the track to the 45 we will have in Australia, so in Melbourne, it will probably be a whole different story. We want to fight for both championships, as we know we have two drivers who can do it, and the mood in the team is very positive. We will continue to work hard to be ready in two weeks’ time for the start of the season.”

Hamilton, despite an early shutdown on Friday, praised the team’s strides. “Overall, it’s been a great few days and we’ve made some strong progress as a team,” he said. “We had to finish a little earlier than planned today, and the weather has been hard to predict all week, but that’s how testing works sometimes, and we’ve managed to gather a lot of good information to build on before the season starts. The whole team has done an incredible job, and I’m so excited to get to the first race in Melbourne. I can’t wait to go racing with them.”

Leclerc mirrored Vasseur’s caution but hailed the test’s gains. “This has been a very different type of pre-season testing, because of the inconsistent weather in Bahrain making it hard to come to any real conclusions,” he said. “The wind changed from run to run, there was even some rain yesterday, and temperatures fluctuated over the course of the week, so all the teams head to the first race with some more unknowns compared to the past few years. We still learned a huge amount, especially in terms of the way the car feels now that we’ve actually been out on track. We will return to Maranello and spend some time in the simulator, to look for the last details that could make a difference in Melbourne, but also to correlate the feeling in the sim to that in the real car. We are fully focused on maximising our performance over the coming week and I really look forward to kicking off the season.”