Ferrari points out errors: 'We misjudged that'
Ferrari F1 Media
F1 News
- GPblog.com
At Ferrari, the disappointment is great after the Monaco Grand Prix. In Ferrari 's debrief, Inaki Rueda explains what exactly went wrong at pit stops that caused Charles Leclerc to lose so much ground.
Qualifying on P1 and P2 in Monaco usually also guarantees a good result on Sunday. Ferrari however managed to let Leclerc, who had taken pole on Saturday, fall back to fourth place. The team made some serious strategic mistakes and the Head of Race Strategy now looks back on that.
Leclerc has bad luck
Whereas Rueda is pleased with the strategy with Sainz that ensured the Spaniard briefly went to the lead and lost the victory only because he was stuck behind Nicholas Latifi, much went wrong with Leclerc's strategy. ''With Charles, we made two mistakes. The first was that we tried to cover Perez. We had a big gap with Charles and thought this would work. We didn't expect Perez to gain nine seconds on that lap (18). As a result, we lost the race with Charles.''
GPblog's analysis also revealed that Ferrari had overestimated this gap and would have been better off coming in one lap earlier when Perez's tires were still cold. Although Ferrari argues that it lost the race here, with Leclerc there it had only lost one more position on the track compared to Sergio Perez. Not much later, however, things went wrong again.
Second mistake by Ferrari
''The second mistake was again one related to a gap. We wanted to bring both the cars in for slicks. Lap 21 seemed dry enough for slicks and when Sainz came in, we had a gap of 5.5 seconds to Leclerc. For a double pit stop, a six-second gap is comfortable. We thought we would manage it, but going into the pits that gap was only 3.5 seconds. We made a last attempt to keep Leclerc out, but by then he was already in the pits. Charles lost two seconds here. This was crucial, because it allowed Verstappen to come out of the pits ahead of him,'' concludes Rueda.
Besides the fact that the pit stop did not go smoothly, Ferrari's choice was also not ideal. A lap longer on intermediates gave the Red Bull drivers a time advantage and they came out in front of the Ferrari men. Admittedly on cold tires, but overtaking in Monaco is virtually impossible.