Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur explained why the team didn’t maximise Charles Leclerc’s chances of taking pole position by using his team mate’s car to give him a tow.
The team went into the session knowing Lewis Hamilton would take a five-place grid penalty for Sunday’s race. During Thursday’s press conference Hamilton said he was willing to help his team mate in qualifying by running in front of him so Leclerc could benefit from his slipstream and reach higher speeds on the straights.
After their first runs in Q3 Leclerc was second-fastest and Hamilton fourth. However Ferrari chose not to use Hamilton to give Leclerc a slipstream to improve his lap time.
They opted to send Leclerc out of the pits behind Yuki Tsunoda’s Red Bull with Hamilton behind him. Leclerc did not improve on his final lap and fell to fourth place. Hamilton took fifth and will start tomorrow’s race from 10th.
Vasseur said they chose not to use Hamilton’s car to give Leclerc a slipstream because drivers are bound by the requirement to obey a maximum time between the two Safety Car lines during qualifying.
“With this story of maximum lap time, if you do it [give one car a tow] you have to sacrifice one car,” he told the official Formula 1 channel, “and it’s important for the team and for the two drivers to be in a positive mood.”
He said the team also wanted to prioritise ensuring Leclerc was not distracted from preparing his tyres before starting his final lap.
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“For sure it could work,” said Vasseur, “but it also could not work at all.
“Even for Charles, because you are much more focused then on the tow, the gap with the car in front, than on the tyre preparation. And the tyre preparation is so important today that we decided to be focused on our own pace.”
Leclerc qualified two tenths of a second off pole winner Max Verstappen. Vasseur suspects the team could have taken pole position at home.
“I think everything was possible today,” he said. “It was so tight that it could have been pole position, but could have also been much worse. At one stage Norris was quite close to being out.”
He pointed out the gap between first place and 15th was as little as six tenths of a second at one stage in qualifying. “It means that everybody on the grid today will say ‘with this or this I could have done a much better job’. But it is like it is, and let’s be now focused on tomorrow.”
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