Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur disputed a suggestion that his team played “too fair” with Mercedes at the end of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in its battle for second place in the constructors’ championship.
Charles Leclerc was running second ahead of George Russell, but needed the Mercedes driver to drop to fourth in order for Ferrari to finish as the runner-up to Red Bull. Once Sergio Perez — who had a five-second time penalty — overtook Russell, Leclerc slowed to give the Mexican DRS on the final lap in the hope he’d pull five seconds clear, but opted against trying to directly back Russell up himself.
“Too fair? I don’t think so,” Vasseur said. “That’s because you could imagine, to block Russell, then you have also to be sure that Perez is in between you and Russell. If you want to block Russell, it’s a matter of hundreds of seconds.
“I’m not a big fan of this. We did our best in a fair way when we let Perez go, to give him the DRS, to try to help us, but too much would have been too much.”
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In the end, when Perez’s penalty was applied he dropped from second place on the road back to fourth, finishing 1.1s behind Russell and ensuring Mercedes held Ferrari off by just three points.
The focus was on Leclerc’s approach because teammate Carlos Sainz failed to recover into the points after a Q1 exit in Abu Dhabi, but Vasseur says it was other races earlier in the year that proved costly in the fight against Mercedes.
“For sure Carlos was off the pace — that is clear and we have to understand why. But honestly, it’s not [in Abu Dhabi] that we missed something,” he said. “If you have a look on the championship, I think we had a tough event. We had Miami, we had Zandvoort in terms of pace and we had some events when we had a reliability issue, and this was much more painful than [Abu Dhabi].
“We had a strong pace as a team that we are able to fight for the pole position … We fight with the Red Bull almost all the race. I’m not sure that it’s [in Abu Dhabi] that we missed something.”
Sainz agrees, saying Abu Dhabi showed a weakness that Ferrari has had all season when it came to its tire usage, leaving him unable to fight his way back into the points.
“We started on the hard, expecting the hard to help us do a one-stop,” Sainz said. “Again, like we’ve seen many times this year, whenever we start on harder compounds, we struggle a lot. We had nothing to lose starting 16th and we gave it a go, but in the end again it didn’t work for us.
“The harder compounds — at the beginning of the race with dirty air and the sliding — just doesn’t work for us. Once we saw that we had very little chance of scoring points, we left it out for a safety car and it didn’t work out. Also, we had to retire in the end with a PU issue so it’s not like it would have changed much.”