Ferrari Formula 1 boss Fred Vasseur admits that the team was in “a bit of chaos” as it tried to juggle the interests of Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc in Las Vegas.
At one stage Sainz was asking to come in and change tyres, and when he did head for the pitlane he was told at the last second to stay out, losing valuable time.
Sainz also had to let Leclerc past without also letting the closely following Hamilton by as well.
Vasseur acknowledged that graining had made life difficult for the team.
“It’s really depending of the pace that you want to have,” he said. “And I think Charles was behind Russell, and when he tried one lap to push and to overtake Russell, he blew up everything.
“It’s really on the edge always. And they have to trust their feeling also. And it’s not an easy one, but it is like it is.
“It’s true that at the end of the first stint in four or five laps we lost something like 10 seconds. And then you can’t pit also, because you are in the shadow of the mid-pack.
“And if you pit at this stage, you have to overtake everybody. You have to wait for the others, and it’s what happened with Carlos. You have to wait that the others are pitting to pit yourself. And it’s a tricky situation.”
At the chequered flag Sainz was in front of Leclerc, who expressed his anger about how the race had unfolded over team radio.
It was not the first time that there has been some frustration in the camp over strategy choices, but Vasseur played it down.
“We’ll have to discuss this,” he said. “Because at this stage of the race we were discussing with Carlos for the pit stop, what I was explaining, that he was in the shadow of Lawson, Tsunoda, perhaps.
“And he wanted to pit, we wanted to keep him on track. We were discussing like this, and on the top, we had to swap. It was a bit of chaos. When they are into the car, they have their own vision of this. But don’t worry, we’ll discuss it later today.”
Regarding Leclerc’s anger he added: “I’m not worried at all. Again, it’s always the same story that they have to make comments, or they don’t have to make comments, but they are doing comments on the in-lap, and they don’t have always the full picture. We will discuss together, and it won’t be an issue.”
Vasseur admitted that it isn’t easy to manage the tyres in Las Vegas.
“I think the conditions in Vegas are more than extreme for tons of reasons, the level of grip, the track temperature. For sure, it’s not something that we’ll have until the end of the season. It will be different stories.
“And as it’s a completely new situation each time that you are coming to Vegas, and it’s a very fine tuning. It’s not easy to predict, and even on the race I think if you have a look, we struggled a lot on the first stint, but the last stint was okay, it’s not that you are miles away.
“So it was true for us, but true for other teams. It means that you are not completely out of the scope. It’s just a fine tuning.
“And perhaps the fact also that we didn’t do a long stint on the hard before the weekend, but when you long stint the medium, you did three push before, and the graining is already open, it means that it’s putting all the team in a tricky situation. But again, it’s not an excuse.”
