Ferrari shouldn’t feel so bad about another awful weekend in Formula One. The spat between the hapless pit wall and the drivers in Miami, starring an exasperated Lewis Hamilton and a frustrated Charles Leclerc, was cinema gold. Just think about the Netflix ratings.
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.
Miami was, in fact, a better race for Hamilton, which led to the “entertainment” on track. So bad was the qualifying of both drivers – Charles Leclerc finishing eighth, Hamilton 12th – that Ferrari split the strategies, starting Leclerc on the medium tyre and Hamilton on the more durable hard tyres.
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.
The pit wall took an age to issue the instruction with Hamilton screaming at them to make a decision. “Ah! Have a tea break while you’re at it! Come on.” The delay in the dirty air of Leclerc cost Hamilton all the pace he had in the tyres, leaving the team no better off.
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.
After coming eighth in the race – one place behind Leclerc – Hamilton was unrepentant about his attitude in the car and the pointed criticisms he levelled at the leadership in the heat of the contest.
“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.
“I didn’t think the decision came quick enough. You’re like, ‘Come on!’ I have no problems with the team or with Charles. I think we could do better. But the car is not where we really need to be. Ultimately we’re fighting for seventh and eighth.
“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)Vasseur sought out Hamilton in his quarters post-race to talk through the issue.
“My concern is not that he has to speak with TV,” he said.
“It’s that we need to be clear between us that, in this situation, he has to understand what was my feeling on the pit wall.
“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.”
Hmmm. This is the fast lane, Fred. Anyone can reach the right decision if they spend long enough sucking on their pipe.
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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Read More“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.
“Perhaps you can argue at the end that we would have been better to do it directly, but we didn’t know if it [the difference in pace] was the DRS effect or not. We took the tough decision because it’s never easy to ask Charles or Lewis to swap, but we did it.
“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.”
No Fred, the issue was not the decision to swap but the time it took to do it, as Hamilton conveyed.
“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.’
“I could have said way worse things on the radio. You hear some of the things others have said in the past.
“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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