– While Lewis Hamilton struggled with the lack of team orders and Charles Leclerc was frustrated with his Ferrari team’s strategy, team principal Frederic Vasseur says that Scuderia lost the victory at the Formula 1 race in Zandvoort in qualifying. “The pace was good in both races, but if we lacked something this weekend, it was in qualifying,” emphasizes Vasseur.
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Ferrari missed the podium at the last Grand Prix in the Netherlands by less than a second with fourth and fifth places, but according to the team principal, the foundation was laid on Saturday, where Ferrari did not get beyond the third row – two tenths behind fourth place.
“The problem is that qualifying depends extremely on the preparation of the warm-up lap and tire management,” says Vasseur. But qualifying is a different approach than the race and varies from track to track. “You can be good on one side from one weekend to the next and not on the other,” he says.
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That means: Vasseur does not want to talk about a general qualifying weakness at Ferrari. “We had some races like Spielberg where we did a better job in qualifying than in the race,” he says. “There we were on the front row, second and third, and had a bit more to fight in the race.”
In Zandvoort, however, qualifying was the Achilles’ heel, at least on Saturday. Because in the sprint qualifying on Friday, Charles Leclerc was able to secure third place – just 0.055 seconds behind the sprint pole at that time. But in cooler conditions on Saturday, it was much more difficult for the Scuderia.
“And it’s so close that in sprint qualifying four cars are within six hundredths of a second. That means that details on the warm-up lap decide: You saw Lewis on the first day, he had to slow down a bit after turn 10 because he had two or three cars in front of him, and then messed up turn 1,” he explains.
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“That cost him two or three tenths, and in that case you immediately lose four positions and it becomes a bad qualifying.”
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If there is something Ferrari must learn from the weekend in Zandvoort, according to Vasseur, it is not about pure potential. “It is more about execution on these two days. We were able to be fully there in terms of performance in some phases of the weekend, but we simply have to be there all the time,” he makes clear.
Of course, this also applies to the race, in which Ferrari made some mistakes. The first start was still successful and Leclerc was able to pass Oscar Piastri, but at the second start, the position was lost again, even though soft tires were fitted and Piastri had hards. “That was unexpected,” says Vasseur.
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“And then we had a bad stop, and from there it got difficult. But the pace itself was decent, that is not the problem at all.”
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