At the race in France, Carlos Sainz battled Sergio Pérez for third place. At the most critical moment of the wheel-to-wheel battle, the broadcaster turned on Sainz’s radio conversations with an engineer calling his racer to the pits.
After the finish, there was criticism from Ferrari, the essence of which was that it was impossible to call Carlos into the pits at that point in the race. On Tuesday, the Scuderia press office gave the floor to the team’s chief strategist, Iñaka Rueda, who explained that those radio conversations were being taped.
Iñache Rueda: “The negotiations come with a delay in the TV program. We saw perfectly how Perez and Carlos were fighting on lap 41. We saw that Carlos couldn’t overtake Perez on the back straight, so in Turn 10 we contacted him and called him to the pits. However, he believed he could overtake Perez on the next lap, so he replied: “Please, not now. Not on this circle.
Now back to what was shown live. Our conversations came into the televised show at Turn 15, right after the racers passed the race to the pit lane. Contacting the rider so late makes no sense, because he simply does not have time to respond to our request.
Rueda added that Sainz would not have reached the finish without a second pit stop. To do this he would have to do 35 laps on Medium tires, and according to Ferrari’s calculations they would have survived no more than 25 laps. In addition, on worn tires he had no chance of getting five seconds away from Perez and George Russell to compensate for the penalty for leaving the track unsafely after the first pit stop.
As a result, Ferrari opted for the guaranteed option with a fifth-place finish and an extra point for the best lap of the race.
“Because of the penalty, we had to change our approach to the last stint,” said Rueda. – Even if Carlos could catch up with Russell and Perez, he wouldn’t have created a five-second lead over Medium’s composition. So we decided to call him into the pits and put on new tires so that when he got back to the track he would show the best lap and get an extra point.
Source: F1 News
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