Ferrari denies that it went wrong on Sunday with the timing of the call for Carlos Sainz to come in for new tires. According to the team, this impression was created because messages from the on-board radio only reach the TV viewers later.
To the surprise of many, Sainz received the message “box, box” from the team management at the French Grand Prix on Sunday as he was engaged in a fierce battle with Red Bull driver Sergio Perez. “Not now!” Sainz reacted irritated.
“The way TV producers send the data to viewers has a delay,” explained Iñaki Rueda, responsible for strategy at Ferrari, on Tuesday. “In this case, Pérez and Carlos were fighting on lap 41. We saw that Carlos wouldn’t be able to overtake him on the straight.”
That’s why it was decided to call Sainz in at turn ten, Rueda explains. “But for people watching live TV, that call didn’t come in until Turn 15, after he had already passed the pit lane entrance, so he couldn’t even get in, so that call would have been nonsensical at the time. “
‘It was difficult to finish the race on mediums’
Sainz had started from the last row on the Circuit Paul Ricard because he had been given a completely new engine. The Spaniard then started an impressive advance and was briefly on course for a podium place, until he was called in for an extra pit stop.
“After the safety car, we were the only car on the medium tyres, while the competition drove on hard tyres,” continues Rueda. “We knew it would be difficult to finish the race on those tires. We would have been about ten laps short.”
In addition, Sainz had to pay a five-second time penalty for an ‘unsafe release’ at his first pit stop. “He could never have made a five-second gap with Perez and George Russell. That’s why we decided to bring him in so that he could take an extra point for the fastest lap.”
Sainz took that extra point and eventually finished fifth. His teammate Charles Leclerc retired in the race won by Max Verstappen.