It’s relatively easy to say: “Ferrari does Ferrari things”. In the end, the risk of experimenting with the one-stop strategy may have been worth it for Charles Leclerc. His sixth place is a waste anyway because he was disqualified after the race.
Nevertheless, team boss Frederic Vasseur is dissatisfied because the Ferrari data does not seem to be correct. Once again, the strategy department has to put up with unpleasant questions.
“Of course we have mixed feelings,” said Vasseur after the race, when the disqualification had not yet been determined. “On the one hand, we came fourth with Carlos. But with Charles, who was around ten seconds ahead of Carlos after twelve laps, we didn’t make a good decision with the strategy.”
“The problem was probably that we didn’t have a clear idea before the race. We hesitated a bit and that made him hesitate a bit in the first stint whether to push or not. And then we made a mistake.”
What makes it so bitter: Ferrari actually believed that they had done everything right with one stop. “We have to focus on the mistake and try to understand why we made this decision because we were convinced that it was the right decision with the information we had at the time.”
So all the simulations failed: “This means that the numbers we had on the pit wall and in the factory in this phase of the race were not good.”
Would other stoppers have helped?
This was not least because Leclerc was really the only driver who only came into the pits once. This means he drove “off sequence” compared to everyone else.
“It’s not just about losing time because of the tires, but also about what the others are doing. We made the mistake of assuming that the strategies in the field would be around 50:50. But that wasn’t the case .All other drivers have two stops [und mehr] made.”
This had unpleasant side effects for Leclerc: “That means that you have a lot more traffic around you because you are driving a different race than everyone else. You have to overtake a lot and are overtaken a lot.
“And every time someone overtakes you, you lose 1.5 seconds. That means if the same four drivers overtake you twice, you lose twelve seconds just because of that.”
According to Vasseur, other competitors were still turning the corner: “I think Hamilton wasn’t far from making a stop. Russell clearly just wanted to make a stop, but he was the last one in [Führungs]group. It’s much easier to change strategy when you’re the last one [in einer Gruppe] is.
With Sainz, however, the question of strategy didn’t arise at all: “We quickly made two stops with him because he was fighting with Max. With Charles it was less clear. We were a bit in the middle with him.”