New Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur believes life in F1 will be “much smoother” now that Mohammed Ben Sulayem has taken a step back.

While focus this week has returned to on-track action with the official testing session in Bahrain kicking off today, at the start of the year it was a lot different.

Following the FIA’s call to ban statements from drivers, a move that received near universal criticism, the sport’s governing body further annoyed the commercial arm of the sport by openly supporting the Andretti bid to get on the grid.

But FOM and Liberty Media reached a point of no return following Ben Sulayem’s branding of a $20 billion price tag offered by Saudi Arabia to purchase the sport as “inflated”.

Tensions seemed to be on the rise with a number of team bosses said to be wanting Ben Sulayem to be removed from office despite only being a year into his four-year presidency term.

However, in a move that was seemingly made to lower tempers, the FIA announced Ben Sulayem would be relinquishing hands-on control of F1 in a move that they said was long in the making.

Since that announcement which was made on February 8, some sense of normality has returned to the sport as teams began unveiling their cars and preparing for the new campaign and one of the new team principals believes that once the season is underway, everything will be “much smoother.”

“Well, I think that it’s always the case in the winter time that every single discussion is going up,” Vasseur told Sky Sports.

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“Now we’ll be back on track, we’ll come back to the reality of the business and it will be much smoother.”

At Ferrari, Vasseur is at perhaps the most politically charged team of them all with the expectation of a whole nation resting on his shoulders and the Frenchman has already begun playing the role of the politician.

Speaking about a perceived favouritism towards his former driver Charles Leclerc, Vasseur sought to confirm to Carlos Sainz that was not the case.

“I didn’t need [to speak with Sainz] because I think Carlos trusts me, I trust Carlos,” the former Sauber man said. “We had a long collaboration in the past.

“I tried to get him at Renault a couple of years ago and then at Sauber so he didn’t want to come to me, I came to him,” he joked.

“No, the mood in the team is perfect. We have a mutual trust and this is the most important [thing] when you want to speak about the team and the relationship between the drivers and the team.”

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