Ferrari Formula 1 team principal Fred Vasseur said "poor" execution reflected in "too many mistakes" was the reason for his team's disappointing Hungarian Grand Prix.
Vasseur was keen to stress Ferrari outscored main constructors' championship rival Mercedes (albeit by just one point), but much more was expected from the SF-26 around the twisty confines of the Hungaroring - and allowing Kimi Antonelli to extend his points lead over Lewis Hamilton in the drivers' standings from 45 to 50 was a difficult pill to swallow.
So Vasseur, who has usually preached calmness and the avoidance of race-by-race emotional whiplash in his time as the chief of Ferrari, seemed more openly frustrated than usual.
The 'uncorrelated' pace
While the Ferraris looked competitive on the C5 softs but limited on the C4 mediums in the race, and eventual race winner Lando Norris appeared out of reach, Vasseur indicated there wasn't enough of a clean-air sample to know whether his two drivers could've challenged for the win.
Charles Leclerc, who was classified fourth, argued that the SF-26 proved too erratic. "We weren't particularly stellar at any point of the race," he insisted. "The first stint on hards wasn't bad. The last stint on softs was pretty good.
"But then there were too many ups and downs. And I think that's really where we need to work, is try and find that consistency with this car - because it's just been very, very tricky on some stints for Lewis and some other stints with me. And it's just a little bit strange how uncorrelated everything is."
But Vasseur said "it's difficult to clearly understand the pace" and that "a different race" was on the cards had Leclerc stayed second off the line, between the two McLarens.
"It's not a good Sunday, because when you are 1-2 on Friday you expect much more than P4-P5," he said. "And on top of that we made too many mistakes, starting with the start, with the [pitlane speeding] penalty, with the fact that Max [Verstappen] overtook us on track, that each time that we were doing a pitstop we are losing a position for 0.2 or 0.3 seconds.
"Everything went wrong, but for sure we have to do a much better job on Sunday.
"I think the pace was better, the pure pace; the pure pace of the team was probably better this weekend than Spa or Silverstone. We were in front in FP1, in FP2, we were able to fight for pole with Lewis. I think the execution was very poor. It's more the execution."
That included what Vasseur described as "a succession of mistakes" on Hamilton's side, from a loss of time during the final pitstop that allowed Antonelli to squeeze past on the run to the timing line, to a pitlane speeding transgression by 0.1km/h that Vasseur indicated was the result of Hamilton switching off the limiter a fraction too early.
A blown strategy chance?
Hamilton, for his part, described the race as "pretty bad, pretty frustrating".
The speeding penalty dropped him behind Leclerc in the classification, but track position had been lost already to Antonelli with the pitstop during the virtual safety car for Oscar Piastri's issue. Hamilton believed in hindsight he should have stayed out - like Verstappen behind him did on fresher but softer tyres.
"I'm not really sure why we stopped at the end," Hamilton said. "I got the call right before the pitlane entry, so I didn't have time to debate it.
"I would never have stopped if it meant that I was giving up track position. So, I thought that that would not be the case.
"I think [staying out] we probably would have lost out to Max, probably. He was on fresher tyres. I would imagine. Maybe in that last stint. I may have been able to hold on to P2. He was catching me. But most likely it would have been P3. It would have [still] been much better."
Staying out would've required Hamilton to see out a 40-lap stint on the hard tyre instead of switching to softs. In hindsight, this was proven possible by less-performant cars, as in 10th and 11th Arvid Lindblad and Gabriel Bortoleto ended the race with 49 and 40 laps on their sets of the C3 respectively (though neither driver was happy about this).
Vasseur was defensive of the decision to pit. "We realised that the soft was not that bad, we used the stint of Max [as reference] and we decided to go for the soft because we had the oldest hard of the field [at that moment].
"As we had a poor start, we tried to do the undercut, we put the [new] tyres very early [in each stint] - and you have to take decisions before the results. I think if I had to do the same, I would do the same today, try to push with the soft."
from The Race https://ift.tt/wuyxWgG
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