Prost: McLaren and Ferrari no longer approach F1 in the right way
According to Alain Prost, former McLaren and Ferrari driver, these two legendary teams are mistaken in their approach to tackling this new Formula 1 season. A lack of responsiveness and a certain immobility are believed to be the cause of their current problems.
As he prepares to commentate on the Monaco Grand Prix for the French TV channel Canal +, Alain Prost discussed in the columns of Autosport the difficult start to the season for two big names in the discipline: McLaren and Ferrari.
For the four-time French world champion, these two teams, for which he has raced in the past, have failed to adapt to the new regulations of recent years and have shown a certain rigidity in their approach: « When Red Bull entered Formula 1, it was obviously a marketing platform for them, but they also had a strategy and a plan. The same goes for Mercedes; you could see in the last two or three years that they had a plan. They knew where they would be this year. If you compare that to McLaren and Ferrari, they are always in the same continuity. There’s no fresh start, it’s always the same thing, and sometimes you need to do things differently. »
After the respective successful periods of McLaren and Ferrari, with Adrian Newey or Michael Schumacher, both teams failed to rebuild after the departures of key figures, as Alain Prost states: « For Ferrari, everyone talks about Michael Schumacher, but there were at least four or five other people behind the scenes. So, when they leave you, it’s difficult to rebuild something new. And it was the same with McLaren when Newey left them. »
However, these two teams have recently proven that they can react and make some changes with the arrival of Marco Mattiacci replacing Stefano Domenicali at Ferrari and the return of Ron Dennis as head of McLaren. It remains to be seen whether these changes will influence the performance of the two teams in the long term.
