The Red Bull team can understand why Ferrari called Charles Leclerc into the pits to change tires on the twelfth lap of the Formula 1 race at Monza during the virtual safety car triggered by Sebastian Vettel’s retirement.
Both the Monegasse and Max Verstappen started the Italian Grand Prix on the soft tires and the Dutchman was able to stalk the Ferrari driver from seventh place on the grid within a very short time.
Before the virtual safety car phase, the gap between Leclerc and Verstappen was just 1.5 seconds, which is why Ferrari took the opportunity to change tires to save time.
However, the VSC phase ended a little too early for Leclerc, so he was no longer able to take the full time advantage in the pit lane.
Christian Horner praises Ferrari’s “good decision”.
Red Bull were also standing in the pit lane at the time to bring Verstappen in, but decided to follow an opposite strategy to Ferrari. When asked if the Dutchman would have come in if Leclerc had stayed out, team boss Christian Horner says: “Yes.”
Therefore he is not surprised that Ferrari gave up the position on the track with the pit stop: “No, we understand why they did that. Strategically they made a good decision. I think we just had a faster one today car and would have won the race regardless.”
“They have … me [am Funk] told me that I should do the opposite of Charles,” Verstappen confirms the situation during the virtual safety car. “So it could have gone either way today, I guess.”
Ferrari’s pace just not good enough?
But even during his second stint on the fresh medium tires, Leclerc wasn’t really able to convince with his pace, as he only caught up a little on Verstappen at the top with old soft tires. When the Red Bull driver finally came to change tires on lap 25 and Leclerc took the lead, Verstappen was able to show off his pace on new tires.
The world champion took about a second off Leclerc per lap, with a gap of about ten seconds after the pit stop. Extrapolated, Verstappen could easily have overtaken the Ferrari driver on the track, but Ferrari decided to bring Leclerc into the pits on lap 33 for a second tire change on fresh soft tires.
But even Leclerc’s performance on this tire wasn’t good enough to threaten Verstappen. He was only able to reduce a deficit of 20 seconds after the pit stop to 17 seconds before the last safety car phase at the end of the race.
Christian Horner: “We had tremendous pace”
“I think we’ve refined the car and we’ve managed to understand the car pretty well,” said Horner after Verstappen’s fifth win in a row. “We made a couple of compromises in qualifying because we knew we were going to get a penalty and it paid off because I think we were very quick today and had tremendous pace.”
According to Horner, Verstappen’s good start was decisive for the ultimately undisputed Red Bull victory: “Max was already in P3 at the end of the first lap and a few laps later he was second before he then caught up with Charles. “
“In the end, Charles switched to two stops, but even on the soft tire his pace was not sufficient compared to Max on medium to catch him. So we had the race safely under control,” said the Red -Bull team boss.
Christian Horner regrets the end behind the safety car
When Daniel Ricciardo rolled out in his McLaren shortly before the end of the race, all the top drivers switched to soft tires again for the last sprint, which Horner regretted didn’t happen after all.
“We had a new set of tires that we [im Qualifying] had saved and we expected to be able to resume racing as the incident looked fairly harmless.
But the race didn’t restart and it was disappointing not to win in race conditions because that goes against pretty much everything we’ve talked about in recent years. But to get this win is great and it puts Max in a great position.”
Max Verstappen: “Were the fastest on every compound”
“We had a great race, we were the fastest on every compound,” Verstappen confirms the statements of his team boss. “And the tire degradation was very good, so we had a really good race car. In the end I was able to control the gap.”
“Obviously it helped a lot that I had a great first lap and was able to outperform most of the cars before they got, let’s say, into a DRS train. From there both sets of tires felt great and I was able to do the first stint extend it a bit. And everything worked very well on the mediums too.”