Ferrari squandered their chance of a better result in the Hungarian Grand Prix by making too many mistakes in the race, team principal Frederic Vasseur admitted.
However he stood by their decision to change the running order of their drivers through the timing of their final pit stops.
Charles Leclerc suffered an especially frustrating day as he slipped from sixth on the grid to finish seventh. He lost time with a slow pit stop and was penalised for breaking the speed limit when he came in. A faulty radio and drinks tube added to his frustrations.
Vasseur said the team need to review the decisions it made and errors it committed over the race weekend, which was the first run to Formula 1’s experimental Alternative Tyre Allocation rules. He believes those errors contributed more to its poor result than the car’s performance.
“I think that first we will need time to understand what we did right and wrong,” said Vasseur after the race. “The format was different and it’s not so easy to analyse the perfect weekend and you need to get all the results to be able to do a retro-engineering on this.
“But I think on our side it’s much more the fact that we made too many mistakes, from the beginning to the end. It’s not just about the pit stop or the pit entry or the quali or the management of the tyres.
“At the end, the potential was probably better than what we showed yesterday. Today, at least with Charles, we lost 20 seconds on the race.”
Carlos Sainz Jnr finished one place behind his team mate. He started the race on the soft tyre compound in a bid to recover places after failing to reach the top 10 in qualifying. Before the weekend began Ferrari expected the Hungaroring would suit their car better than the previous venue, Silverstone, and Vasseur admitted they were disappointed to see both cars finish outside the top five.
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“It’s not the result that we were expecting coming into Budapest but I think it was largely compromised yesterday after the quali with P6 and P11,” said Vasseur after the race.
“We had to take some risk at the start, particularly with the soft [tyre]. It was a good choice but we know also that after the start we had to fit two sets of hard and it was quite tough.
“On Charles’ side I think the race was probably much better because the pace was there. But it was largely compromised with the pit entry, with the penalty and then we had an issue with the wheel gun and we lost another eight seconds on the pit stop. Plus then the traffic, he would have been probably P5, I don’t know, but it’s a missed opportunity.”
Vasseur, who took over as Ferrari team principal at the beginning of the year, said the work on addressing the errors they made will begin immediately.
“I spent the last 35 years or something like this of my life on the pit wall and every single Monday of my career you have to do the list and you have a long list of mistakes,” he told media including RaceFans in Hungary.
“Sometimes you can see it, sometimes not, but the job of the team principal is to do the list with the team members and to fix it. And I’m very open with you to say that we are doing too many mistakes.”
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However he stands by the team’s decision to move Leclerc ahead of his team mate during the race by bringing him in earlier for his second pit stop. Leclerc fell behind Sainz at his slow first stop, but jumped ahead by switching to his final set of tyres one lap before his team mate.
Vasseur defended the decision, pointing out Leclerc’s strategy gave him the opportunity to finish well ahead of Sainz.
“It was the best way for us to protect the result of the team,” he said. “At the end of the race, if you have a look, I think that the potential of Charles, considering the fact that Carlos has to start with soft and how we were with the life that Charles would have finished probably 20 seconds ahead of Carlos, it mean that it was the good choice.”
However Leclerc’s race was compromised by his penalty for speeding in the pits. “Nobody can predict before the call that you will get the penalty, you will have the issue with the wheel gun and so on,” said Vasseur.
“It’s always easy to redo the race after the chequered flag and to say it would have been different. But I think at this stage it was the right call and I’m still convinced.”
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2023 Hungarian Grand Prix
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