Fred Vasseur: "If you make a mistake, you pay for it, but I don't want to blame anyone"
Yesterday at 06:21 PM
Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur viewed the result from Sunday's Singapore race as positive for the team. Charles Leclerc showed great pace and good tire management, both on the Medium and Hard compounds.
However, if there's one thing Maranello will regret from Marina Bay, it's definitely qualifying. Sainz's error relegated him to tenth place and triggered a red flag, during which Charles Leclerc suffered a tire blanket issue that severely affected his performance.
Thoughts on Qualifying
Reflecting on the matter after the race, Frederic Vasseur expressed disappointment with the outcome for one driver in particular: “We were doing well. In Q2 we were P2 or something like that. Then in Q3 we only had one lap, and with such tight margins, if you make a mistake in Turn 1, you pay for it heavily,” he said, referring to Charles Leclerc.
Realizing he had singled out the Monegasque driver, he quickly added: “I don’t want to blame anyone. But we all need to be more focused. If you make even the smallest mistake in qualifying (not referring to Baku in this case, right? Editor's note), it becomes difficult to recover,” he said in an interview for the official Formula 1 website.
Better in the Race
After giving his team a bit of a wake-up call—particularly, in the writer’s opinion, to one individual, Frederic Vasseur shifted focus to the race to boost morale ahead of the season’s final stretch: “On Sunday, Charles had a strong pace, while Carlos was a bit held up. Tire management was in line with recent events, and we should be satisfied with that. Now we have a couple of weeks to prepare for the last six races. It was important to finish on a positive note. I don’t know how hard Norris was pushing at the end, but we had the same pace, and that should give us confidence,” Fred Vasseur said, as reported by Formula1.com.
Frederic Vasseur's analysis of the Singapore Grand Prix is further supported by the fact that Charles Leclerc extended his first stint on Mediums, allowing him to have much fresher tires compared to his rivals by the end. However, the stint overall wasn't bad.
There's no doubt that Ferrari needs more focus, as the tire blanket incident clearly shows. But in this 2024 Formula 1 season, perhaps the two people in Ferrari least deserving of this criticism are the drivers, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz. Mistakes have been made, and there will be more, but we also need to consider the SF-24 relative to the other cars on the grid. The SF-24 single-seater, especially after the Spanish Grand Prix at the Circuit de Barcelona, was far from perfect, and at times the drivers managed to surprise us with results that exceeded expectations, especially Charles Leclerc.
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