Sebastian Vettel has explained why he told Ferrari it had “messed up” his strategy at the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix, where he endured another miserable afternoon of racing.
Vettel spun at the beginning of the grand prix, adding to the long list of unforced errors made by the four-time world champion in recent seasons. He spent the majority of the race from that point fighting back up the order.
At one point he was relegated backwards and into traffic at a pit-stop, prompting him to radio Ferrari with an irritated tone.
“It is in the gap that we didn’t like,” he said. “We spoke about it this morning. I’ll hang in there, but you know you’ve messed up”.
Vettel finished 12th on another afternoon he was shown up by his teammate, with Charles Leclerc finishing fourth. Last weekend at the British Grand Prix Vettel finished 10th, while Leclerc claimed a podium finish.
After the race Vettel explained the radio message and said the decision to pit when he did made no sense.
“Well we spoke this morning and said there was no point pitting knowing, knowingly, knowing that we will run into traffic and that’s exactly what we did,” Vettel said. “We went also onto a hard tyre, which we then only had on for ten laps, probably not even that, so it didn’t make any sense.
“I mean why would you put the hard for ten laps and put the medium for 20 laps. So I was running out of tyres towards the end so we spoke about exactly that so yeah. Not I guess not the best work we all could of done today.”
When asked if there is something different with his car compared to Leclerc’s, Vettel said: “I don’t know… I mean I guess, something is there that I’m missing so I’m not sure what it is, nevertheless I try to get out of bed and do as best as I can.
“For sure today we could have been higher up. For my side with the spin I’m not sure what happened there also with strategy we could have recovered better. I think the main difference is we don’t have clean races from where we start. He had a couple of clean races so far, so…”