Frederic Vasseur: The situation was very difficult

In Formula 1, every man for himself is an axiom, although drivers can of course sacrifice their personal interests in the interests of the team. But when a team doesn’t formally care in which order the drivers finish, anything can happen on the circuits, and in Las Vegas we saw another example of this.

We will probably never know what happened in the Ferrari team debriefing after the finish of yesterday’s race, but you can imagine that the atmosphere there was quite tense. On the one hand, the Scuderia achieved the best possible result: Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc could not fight with the Mercedes drivers, the speed of the car did not allow it, but they still took 3rd and 4th place.

However, Charles did not hide his irritation with his teammate’s actions: during the second pit stop, Sainz was instructed by the team not to attack his teammate, but did it in his own way. On the 32nd lap he was ahead of Charles, who had just returned to the track and had not yet had time to warm up the tires.

During the race, Leclerc and Brian Bozzi, his race engineer, had the following dialogue:

– Charles, you did your job for the sake of the team.

– Yes, I did my job, but this man overtakes me every time, he always does it. It’s disrespectful, it’s not nice, he does it all the time.

To this we can add Leclerc’s words, spoken after the finish: “Why am I unhappy? Because there are things we agreed on before the race, and today these agreements were violated. Since we finished 3rd and 4th, nothing has changed for the team. But if we talk about the situation in the individual competition, then there is something to regret, because I am competing with Norris.

I understand that I have to rely only on myself, perform better in the qualifications and try to do everything perfectly. Now I will only proceed from my own interest.”

And this is what Sainz said: “I promised not to talk to the press about this, otherwise this will start every time we comment on something… Charles and I agreed not to broach this subject publicly and everything can only be discussed among ourselves. This is just our business with him.

I never talk about such things, neither on the radio nor with the press, I don’t like it. But the situation is unpleasant and could have been avoided.”

When the team discussed the events of the race and its consequences behind closed doors, Frederic Vasseur had to act as referee – it was the team leader who had the final say in such disputes. Immediately after the finish he admitted that the situation was “very difficult”:

“To be honest, I haven’t spoken to Carlos or Charles yet. It was a very difficult situation because at one point during the first stint we had 3-4 seconds to make a pit stop decision because both drivers wanted to change tires.

Initially we wanted to expand the segment, we discussed this with Carlos and the moment for a pit stop was missed. I think the race was very difficult for us and the drivers feel a lot of pressure in such conditions.

Naturally they get very upset if they lose time on each lap due to tire granulation. Because of this we had serious problems. By the end of the segment we were losing up to two seconds per lap, and this even happened again at the end of the second segment.

But overall the pace on hard tires wasn’t bad. The problem is that we missed everything in the beginning. We managed to keep losses to a minimum, because it was important for us to earn more points than our opponents. We earned 12 points more than McLaren and 16 more than Red Bull. This was probably our maximum, because the Mercedes just flew around the track.

Now we have to concentrate on preparing for the next race, and the weekend program in Qatar includes a sprint, and this is an additional opportunity to earn points. In theory this route is not the best for us, but we will see what we can do.”

After the Grand Prix of Las Vegas, Carlos Sainz reduced the gap with Oscar Piastri, who occupies 4th place in the personal classification, to 9 points. He is 60 points behind Leclerc, who is in third place, and he will not be able to overtake his teammate.

But the Spaniard’s desire to spend the end of the season as best as possible is understandable. First of all, he is working on the future and wants to show everyone that he can regularly show good results behind the wheel of a fast car. Williams is unlikely to get such an opportunity.

And he probably also, on some subconscious level, wants Ferrari to regret their decision to replace him with Lewis Hamilton. Something tells me that it will be much more difficult to agree with the seven-time world champion that he should give way to Leclerc in some situations.