“Thank God Ferrari started from so far behind, because they were actually the fastest on both tires,” explained Helmut Marko to “ServusTV” after the Formula 1 race in Canada. According to the Austrian, the Scuderia could have been a real threat to Red Bull on Sunday.
Instead, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz only finished fourth and fifth. The race itself did not prevent a better result. Rather, qualifying was to blame, in which Leclerc missed Q3 and Sainz had received a penalty.
The Ferrari drivers only started the race from positions ten and eleven and stretched out in traffic at the beginning. For team principal Frederic Vasseur it was therefore “a positive Sunday” because both cars still made it into the top 5.
The decisive factor was the strategy of all things – in the past not always the strength of Ferrari. But when the safety car was deployed on lap twelve on Sunday in Canada, Ferrari made exactly the right decision on the pit wall.
At this point, Leclerc and Sainz are stuck in eighth and tenth. While almost all other drivers used the safety car for a pit stop, Ferrari left both cars on the track and thus moved up to fourth and fifth place.
Leclerc emphasizes that it was “a good strategy” because you were previously stuck on a DRS train. “You can’t do anything in a situation like that. I was faster than the guys in front of me, but I couldn’t overtake because Lando [Norris] had DRS before me,” said Leclerc.
Formula 1: Ferrari strategy not without “risk”
Vasseur reveals: “[Die Fahrer] said, ‘Just give us some free travel.’ And for that it was best [hinter dem Safety-Car] unstoppable.” Because that’s how you got Leclerc and Sainz out of traffic. That was “the best way” to get ahead.
“But of course it’s a risk. Because if you have another safety car 15 laps later, it becomes a little more difficult,” explains Vasseur. But because there was no more safety car, the plan worked and Ferrari could hold P4 and P5 until the end of the race.
Leclerc believes that after the messed up qualifying, that was the maximum that was still possible in the race. Speaking to ‘Sky’, he explains: “We had good race pace and strategy, did everything right. It’s a shame about Saturday, that put us behind.”
“Overall I’m happy, it was a step in the right direction. The car already felt great on Friday and it’s nice that that was confirmed in the race,” says Leclerc, who reveals: “The feeling with the car was also better than in the first part of the season.”
He felt comfortable on both tire compounds (medium and hard) and the tire management was good, which is why the race was “positive” overall. So what would have been possible if the Ferraris had started from further up?
“I think it would have been a nice fight up front between three different manufacturers,” said team-mate Sainz, who believes that Lewis Hamilton in the Mercedes and Fernando Alonso in the Aston Martin could have fought for the podium.
Vasseur: In the end we were as quick as Alonso
Team boss Vasseur emphasizes in this context: “We drove the last stint with the same tires as Alonso, I think, and with almost the same number of laps. It was plus or minus a second in 30 laps.”
When Leclerc made his pit stop on lap 39, he was around 8.2 seconds behind Alonso. In the end it was around 9.1 seconds. In the end, both of them actually drove an almost identical final stint on the hard tyres.
“Certainly one can always say that Verstappen [an der Spitze] didn’t go full throttle,” said Vasseur. Nevertheless, they were much closer than last. At the finish, Leclerc – despite the poor starting position – was just 18.6 seconds behind the winner Verstappen.
Sainz is all the more annoyed about the bad qualifying, because on Sunday they had a “solid pace” and a “solid strategy”. The Spaniard wasn’t surprised that the Ferrari pace was significantly better than last time in Barcelona.
“I knew that Barcelona wasn’t a good track for us and that Canada would be better. That was already confirmed on Friday,” said Sainz. Because the Ferrari is generally good in slow corners and Montreal is a track that doesn’t demand that much from the tires.
Nevertheless, Leclerc makes it clear: “We still lack a bit of pace.” Because the long-term goal is not to fight for second and third places with Mercedes and Aston Martin. “We want to fight for first places again,” Leclerc recalls.
Why Sainz Leclerc wasn’t allowed to attack
Ferrari, on the other hand, did not want to see an internal fight. After the safety car, Team Sainz gave the instruction not to attack Leclerc, although the Spaniard said he had had a little more pace in the car over the radio.
“It wasn’t that we wanted to protect anyone,” emphasizes Vasseur. But the fact is that a fight between the two pilots would only have lost time. You couldn’t afford that “because we tried to widen the gap to Ocon and maybe to Norris.”
Therefore, “it would have been stupid” to let the drivers fight each other, says Vasseur, who emphasizes in the overall context at ‘Sky’: “If you start from P10 and P11 and finish in P4 and P5, that’s good. It’s a nice reward for the team.”
You can now see “the light at the end of the tunnel” and have the confirmation “that we are developing the car in the right direction,” explains the team boss. However, one small question still remains: What was going on on the starting grid when, shortly before the start of the race, people were still working in panic on Leclerc’s car?
“Panic is not the right word,” Vasseur clarified, explaining: “We had to get FIA approval to break the plank [am Unterboden] to change.” Because it was slightly damaged on the way to the starting grid.
“And we are not able to change parts without the green light from the FIA,” said Vasseur. Ultimately, the incident had no effect on the race result. Incidentally, after Baku, it was only the second time this year that Ferrari had both cars in the top five.