Fred Vasseur is not questioning the car. He is questioning the team around it.
Ferrari’s team principal walked away from Zandvoort on 23 August convinced his drivers should have been on the podium, and equally convinced that Ferrari’s own pit wall handed the result to Mercedes.
“Yeah, the pace was decent in the race, but we had some issues with execution,” Vasseur told reporters after the race.
“But it is how it is that we now have to take a deep look at what we did and what we did wrong, to understand why we lost the position at the start on softs, and to try to do better next week.”
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Three mistakes at Zandvoort
The Frenchman broke Ferrari’s afternoon down into three distinct failures.
The first came at the restart after the red flag triggered by Max Verstappen’s Lap 1 crash. Leclerc had a poor getaway on the second start and was passed by Oscar Piastri’s McLaren, despite the Australian running the harder compound.
“We had a poor start with Charles on the second start. We lost position to Piastri, who was on the hards, and we lost a lot of time at this stage of the race,” Vasseur said.
The second failure was a slow pit stop for Leclerc that cost him another place. The third was the strategy call that left Hamilton, on fresher rubber, stuck behind his teammate.
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Hamilton let his radio do the talking. “Great waste of time there, guys,” he said sarcastically after being held up, before asking whether Ferrari were using him “as a guinea pig”.
Vasseur explains the silent radio
Vasseur told Formula1.com that Ferrari had deliberately withheld the plan from Hamilton’s cockpit.
“We didn’t want to tell him the strategy at this stage, because we didn’t want to disclose it to the competitors,” he said.
Hamilton, speaking after the race, said he had been frustrated watching Mercedes execute the calls he wanted.
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“I want to win. I’m here to win and it is difficult when you’re looking ahead and you see the two Mercedes drivers, they get the call and it’s done,” he said.
Ferrari 59 points off the lead
The execution errors matter because the numbers are moving away from Ferrari.
Antonelli, who finished second at Zandvoort, now leads the drivers’ championship on 242 points. Hamilton is Ferrari’s best-placed driver on 183, level with George Russell but behind on countback. Leclerc sits fifth on 155.
In the constructors’ standings, Ferrari are on 338 points, 87 behind Mercedes.
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Ferrari’s next race is the Italian Grand Prix at Monza on 6 September, their home round.
