Ferrari must improve consistency – ‘reduce delta’ between stints

Ferrari F1 boss Fred Vasseur is satisfied with his team’s progress of late but highlights the need for the Scuderia to improve its consistency across all of its tyre compounds on race day.

Last weekend in Mexico, for the second race in succession, Charles Leclerc claimed pole position. But on Sunday, the Monegasque and teammate Carlos Sainz, who qualified second, were unable to hold their own at the top of the field.

Both drivers lost out to Max Verstappen at the start while Leclerc also collided - through no fault of hi own - with the Red Bull driver’s teammate Sergio Perez at the first corner, a contact that damaged the Ferrari’s front wing.

Leclerc was nevertheless able to retain second during his first stint on the medium tyre which he extended until lap 31, just before the race was red flagged following the crash of Haas’ Kevin Magnussen.

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But after the restart, in the second part of the race, Leclerc clearly struggled to turn on his hard tyres.

“My feeling on the pit wall is that the first stint was okay, but we were three or four tenths slower than Max with the damage on the car. It was, I think, almost a good stint,” commented Vasseur.

“With the hard we were never able to restart the tyres,” he bemoaned. “We were always on the shy side and it didn’t work at all.”

Overall, Vasseur gave his team’s performance and execution on the day a thumb’s up, but he also made clear that there were still areas to improve, emphasizing the tyre department.

“I don’t want to say that it’s a bad race,” he added. “We had a bad stint at the end, which is clear, and it’s the main issue today. But the first part of the race went very well.

“I think that we are doing a step forward. Now we did four pole positions out of the last six races, it’s a step forward for us and we have to be probably a bit more consistent on the race or at least to have no delta between the stints because it’s very often where we are losing the positions.”

Looking back on events, Vasseur was focused on the learnings Ferrari should extract from its race rather than on pondering what could have been.

“I don’t want to race with ‘if, if, if’ [or] what happened if we pitted two laps after, it was with the red flag and we’d have started from pole position and so on and so on,” he said.

“Races are like this, you have tons of events.

“The feeling is that we were able to match, almost, Max, and to be probably a bit faster than Lewis on the first part of the race, and we lost the path of the event on the second stint.

“And I see the only difference is the compound.”

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