Ferrari boss Vasseur defends team’s strategy at F1 Miami GP

Frederic Vasseur has defended Ferrari’s Miami Grand Prix team orders calls and, although the team principal accepted the frustration of drivers Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton during the race, he denied that there was any inertia in decision-making.

During the race, Ferrari made the call to swap Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton around to ensure the Briton could press his medium tyres into service in an effort to catch the Mercedes of Andrea Kimi Antonelli in sixth.

When it became apparent Hamilton couldn’t make any further inroads into the Italian after cutting the gap down by a couple of seconds, Leclerc was moved back into seventh place. Although he closed in further, he ran out of time to challenge the Bologna-born teen.

Both Ferrari drivers admitted to displeasure around the tactics, with Hamilton reckoning that the decisions were made too slowly and Leclerc feeling uneasy with the situation given the proximity of Williams rival Carlos Sainz.

Vasseur said that the call was made with team policy in mind, and that Ferrari was trying to understand if the respective trailing driver was genuinely quicker or just helped by DRS assistance.

“We have a general policy and we follow the policy,” Vasseur explained. “The question is not to swap and to swap back if you don’t get the guy who is in front of you.

“The issue at this stage of the race is to understand if the car behind is faster than the car in front, or if it’s just the DRS effect.

“[After the race] I had a discussion with Lewis and I can perfectly understand the frustration. They are champions. They want to win races. We are asking them to let their team-mates go. It’s not easy. It’s never easy.

“And I didn’t see another team do it today. That is why we took the responsibility to do it because it’s the policy of the team. We are racing for Ferrari first.

“Honestly, I think as a team we did a good job. Again, we can argue that it would have been better to do it half a lap before or half a lap later. But when you are on the pitwall and you have to understand if the car that’s behind is faster than the car in front [just because of] DRS or not, it’s not an easy call. It’s always much easier to do it two hours later.

“We asked them to do it. They did it. The frustration when you are in the car… I can perfectly understand this. We had a discussion [afterwards] and it was much more relaxed.”

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari

Photo by: Ferrari

Vasseur denied that the decision to swap drivers was too slow, stating that Ferrari was simply attempting to dissect the information in front of the engineers to make a definitive call.

He also suggested that the delays in team radio broadcasts painted a slightly worse picture of the scenario and that the discussions were interspersed with other information.

“The radio transmission… we have to understand that it’s FOM that is managing the delay. It means that sometimes we are asking them something and you have it live half a lap later or one lap later. I already had the case in the past,” the Frenchman added.

“And then we have tons of information that we are discussing with them about the set-up of the car and so on. And it’s not always easy to ask them to do it before Turn 11 or Turn 17. Honestly, I think that we did what we had to do.

“You can always argue that it would have been better to do it half a lap before or half a lap later, but honestly, we did the job.”