Ferrari ‘halved’ again
There Ferrari closes the Spain-Austria-Great Britain hat-trick with Carlos Sainz’s fifth place at Silverstone. 10 points that are enough to maintain second place in the Constructors’ standings, but Red Bull has extended its lead to +71. The overall balance of the hat-trick is more than in the red, because there is a new package of updates, the one introduced in Barcelona, which was not used at Silverstone due to the side effects triggered by the increase in aerodynamic load. Charles Leclerc once again finished without points, a zero that now makes the Drivers’ title a chimera, 105 points away.
Ferrari team principal, Frederic Vasseurto the microphones of Sky Sports F1 he stressed that today’s gamble with Leclerc in immediately fitting intermediate tyres was dictated by the desire to gain ground, a gamble that did not pay off. The number one on the Ferrari pit wall does not believe that the game is over in terms of constructors and aims to take advantage of the updates that have been frozen for now in Hungary in two weeks.
“It’s always easy to question the strategy after the race when you see what happened. We gave the same information to the drivers even if they were not in the same positions on the track, because Carlos at that stage was close to Max, and probably was even faster than him, and he was copying his race a bit. – Vasseur’s analysis – Charles on the other hand had spent the first stint largely behind Stroll and was already 10 seconds behind, and that pushes you and the team to make an aggressive decision. If you remember on the same lap Hamilton and Russell went out at Turn 1 and 2 and it could have worked, but it didn’t. It was more a question of circumstances that pushed us to make that decision. If we had been in a better position from the start of the weekend we would have been in the leading group and we wouldn’t have made a similar decision. I think it was the same problem for everyone, because it also depends on the level of energy you put on the tyre in the first laps. Carlos was conservative in the first part of the stint, and then he had a good part in each stint. As for Carlos we could have come in one lap earlier in the last pit stop, but I don’t think it would have changed much and he still drove a great race. The topic now is not about Newey, it’s more the people around the team talking about Adrian or Enrico, we never start our briefing talking about these things. It’s not a topic of discussion, but it’s true that the last 3-4 GPs have been very difficult for uswith reliability issues in Canada and with the new package in Spain that gave us difficulties. It was also difficult in Spielberg, even though we showed good pace with Charles in qualifying, and then this weekend it was a bit of the same story. We did a comparison test between the packages on Friday and decided to converge on one package on Saturday and it was unfortunate for us that it rained, but the potential was not bad if you look at the race Carlos did today. After 25 laps he was a tenth behind Max. If we look at Budapest we will decide for the new or old specification, at the moment it is not an issue. I think Silverstone is one of the most aggressive circuits in terms of bouncing, which is one of our weaknesses. Today we fixed it and I think that can give us optimism. Now I am focused on this season, although I am happy for Hamilton. We have enough problems and topics of discussion already, so I do not want to think about Lewis now. We will have time to talk about this and welcome him later in the winter, but for now let’s focus on the job to do. we are still second in the constructors and we have to find the dynamics of the first part of the season. We are 70 points from Red Bull, and that is a lot, but if we can score points with two cars we could reduce this gap”.
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