The Grand Prix races follow one another and look the same for Mattia Binotto, once again forced to explain Ferrari’s strategy a week after the undercut mess executed by Sebastian Vettel in Singapore.<\/p>\n
This time, it seems that the German driver interpreted in his own way an instruction given before the race by his team. The goal was to help the four-time world champion, third on the grid, overtake Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes to favor a Ferrari one-two finish at the Russian Grand Prix.<\/p>\n
In any case, this is what Binotto and his team had planned: \u00ab We studied previous races in Russia and knew that it was important to start in the lead after the first lap. Normally, if you start first, you finish first. Naturally, as a team, victory is the goal, so for us, the most important thing was to be 1st and 2nd in the first lap to control the race, positions, and pace. That’s what was going to happen, and without this reliability issue, we would have maintained these positions after the pit stops […] We agreed before the race not to give Hamilton the slipstream and to let Sebastian benefit from it. Charles was not supposed to fight to maintain his position, which we would have returned to him afterward. \u00bb Binotto explains calmly<\/p>\n
He continues: “What happened is exactly what we explained. They got off to a good start, Charles stayed on the left, Sebastian overtook Hamilton and got into Charles’s slipstream. The start went as planned and we deemed it correct to ask Sebastian to give back the position.”<\/p>\n
But visibly, Vettel did not hear it that way: \u00ab We asked Sebastian to let Charles pass, but it is fair to say that at that moment in the race, Charles was not close enough, and it would have made us lose too much time. Then, Sebastian was getting faster and therefore extended the gap over Charles \u00bb Binotto justifies.<\/p>\n
Ferrari therefore changed the way they apply their strategy and decided to play the undercut with Leclerc by having him stop 4 laps before Vettel, even if Binotto only half-admitted it: \u00ab This undercut was done because Charles had tires that were worn. It was the right time for him to pit. We knew that if we stopped both our cars at the same time, we would be vulnerable in the event of a Safety Car compared to Hamilton. So we kept Sebastian on track as long as possible to cover the potential Safety Car deployment. \u00bb<\/p>\n
Ironically for Ferrari, it was Vettel’s retirement a few corners after his stop that triggered the Safety Car, dashing all hopes for Charles Leclerc and handing an unexpected one-two finish to Mercedes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ferrari clearly got tripped up by a risky strategy during the race in Russia. The retirement due to mechanical failure of Sebastian Vettel capped off a race where the Italian team once again demonstrated its limitations in managing the rivalry between its two drivers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":37160,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,1749],"tags":[364,1491],"class_list":["post-9833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-f1","category-news","tag-ferrari","tag-sotchi"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n