There are as many fault lines in this Big Red family drama as there are at Manchester United, and just as at Old Trafford, it all starts at the top. The man with his prints over this latest cock-up was team principal Fred Vasseur, who was brought in to clean up just this kind of management failing perpetrated by predecessor Mattia Binotto.
The fundamental problem, of course, is a slow car. The frustration is exacerbated by the conviction that there is pace in it. Hamilton has struggled throughout the season to master its characteristics, particularly under braking and with understeer, which means the car won’t respond to his prompts through the corners.
This turned out in Hamilton’s favour, giving him use of the quicker medium tyre after the pit stops. For a brief period he was on the back of his team-mate and begging the team to let him through to chase down the Mercedes of Kimi Antonelli, five seconds down the road, while he still had pace in his tyres.
Worse still, when it became obvious that Hamilton would not be catching Antonelli anytime this week but Leclerc might with more life in his hard rubber, Ferrari were again way too slow to trigger the switch, much to Leclerc’s frustration.
“I’ve still got fire in my belly,” he said. “I’m not going to apologise for being a fighter. I’m not going to apologise for still wanting it. I know everyone in the team does, too.
“It wasn’t even anger. It wasn’t like, effing and blinding and anything like that. It’s like, ‘Make a decision! You’re sitting there on the chair, you’ve got the stuff in front of you, make the decision, quick.’ That’s how I was. We’re in a panic, we’re trying to keep the car on the track. We’re computing things fast. I was like, ‘Come on guys, I want to win’.”
Fred Vasseur had a race to forget in Miami (Photo: Getty)“My concern is not that he has to speak with TV,” he said.
“He can trust me, I can trust him and the same with Charles. And when I have to take a decision, I’m taking a decision for Ferrari.”
But F1 does not proceed like that. This is about elite actors getting things right in the spur of the moment. His reasoning had excuse written all over it, making it about the drivers when the decision-making was at fault.
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“It took us one lap, it means that it’s one minute 30 seconds to understand, and then we asked them to swap,” Vasseur went on.
“What happened today is absolutely not an issue for me. I can perfectly understand their frustration when we are asking something like this. It’s frustrating because they have the feeling that they gave up a position. We did it just for the benefit of the team.”
“Fred came to my room,” he said. “I just put my hand on his shoulder and was like, ‘Dude, calm down. Don’t be so sensitive.’
“Some of it was sarcasm. Look, you’ve got to understand we’re under a huge amount of pressure within the car. You’re never going to get the most peaceful messages coming through in the heat of the battle. It was fine.”
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