Team Talk - Sunday at Monza

Red Bull

1st place Charles Leclerc (MON) Ferrari SF-24 with Max Verstappen (NLD) Red Bull Racing. 01.09.2024. Formula 1 World Championship, Rd 16, Italian Grand Prix, Monza, Italy, Race Day. - www.xpbimages.com, EMail: requests@xpbimages.com © Copyright: Batchelor / XPB Images
Sergio Perez
"Since lap one of FP1 this weekend has been tricky and unfortunately, we just never got there. In the beginning today the balance was looking better on the hard and we were able to look after the tyre, but very early on we started to struggle with degradation, and it became hard to manage. On the final stint on the mediums, we did a long stint, and given the pace on that tyre, it was quite difficult to maximise things. My fight with George was just on the limit and we had a nice battle but the tyre wouldn't work for us. We struggled with pace but more than that it was the balance, so we must work to pull it all together a bit more, between low speed and high speed. I am very confident the Team here at track and back at home have the solution, we have produced great cars in the past and there is no reason why we cannot get back on track. We have no questions now, we know the problem. Given it is all related to balance, if we can find a fix then we can switch it around but for now, it's head down until we find the answer."

Max Verstappen
"Overall it was a tricky weekend in Monza both in qualifying and the race. In terms of position, we got the most out of today, there was a bad pit stop and we were also running down on power for most of the race but we just tried to do our own race. We could've executed a better strategy but in hindsight the two-stop was not optimal so it ended up being damage limitation until the end. There is a lot to analyse from this weekend. This is just how racing goes sometimes, we need to put our heads down and work as hard as we can to get back to where we want to be. I've given a lot of feedback on the car, so in the next two weeks before Baku we need to focus on turning things around and fixing some of the issues we've identified over the past few weekends."

Christian Horner, team principal
"Firstly, it's a great result for Charles at home, so congratulations to him and to Ferrari. We couldn't have made that one stop work for us today due to our tyre degradation, so for us we got the most of it that we could, and we leave here with a lot of work to do. Our strategy worked to a degree but then we started to get into graining ourselves, so the issues we had yesterday were there in the race again. I thought Max did a good job and did everything he could to get the most out of it and get sixth. Checo, likewise, drove a good race today and I think where we finished was the maximum we were going to get. Obviously, our performance is a concern right now and the whole Team is working very hard on it. It looks like a balance problem and there needs to be a fix for it, so the Team are working incredibly hard back at the factory to get on top of it. If nothing else, this weekend has really shown where some of our weaknesses are."