Ferrari boss Frederic Vasseur has dismissed Fernando Alonso’s assertion that the team will boast the “car to beat” during this weekend’s Formula 1 Italian Grand Prix.
The Italian marque commenced the season on an encouraging note with two victories in the opening eight events to emerge as Red Bull’s most consistent contender.
However, Ferrari’s budding title challenge has dissipated over recent times as complications in development have seen the team drop behind McLaren and Mercedes.
Nonetheless, Alonso, who drove with Ferrari from 2010 to 2014, has predicted that the Maranello-based squad’s SF-24 car will be the quickest on home soil at Monza.
Despite encountering a challenging campaign last term, Carlos Sainz managed to edge Max Verstappen’s Red Bull to pole position and secured third place in the race.
“I think the top four teams, maybe Mercedes, are a little bit up and down, but McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari, they are podium contenders every weekend,” Alonso said.
“The next two races [discounting the Azerbaijan Grand Prix] for example, Ferrari should be the car to beat.
“What we saw last year in Monza and Singapore, [Charles] Leclerc’s win in Monaco this year, for Singapore, I think they will be the favourites.”
But while Vasseur has repeated that he expects the upcoming circuits to be favourable to Ferrari, he has quashed the notion that it should be regarded as favourites.
“If he’s trying to put pressure, he has to be sure that I won’t read the Twitter of Fernando Alonso,” Vasseur quipped.
“I don’t have Twitter, but I don’t need to have someone telling me that we are the favourite or not.
“We will have exactly the same approach in any case. I hope that we will be in a better shape in the next two or three events.
“We were in a much better shape last year on these tracks.
“Again, it’s a matter of details. The fact that we are in a better shape on the short corner will help us. If we are able to do a step of one or two tenths, it’s a game changer.
“We know also that everybody is improving. We know also that today we had still a big gap with Lando and that we were quite far away. It means that we have a lot of work to do.
“I will never go to Monza, Baku or whatever with the feeling that it will be an easy one.”
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