Vettel scores canny seventh amid radio ire
Sebastian Vettel picked up his second-best result of the 2020 season so far, with seventh in the Spanish Grand Prix, but the race featured further awkwardness between the four-time world champion and his soon-to-be-former Ferrari team.
Vettel was running unexpectedly well in fifth when the team confirmed he had to make his soft tyres last 37 laps to the finish on a one-stop stategy, which left him apparently frustrated, although the team and driver played this down in the aftermath.
“I said,‘well, you could have asked that three laps before because I asked a couple of times, what’s the target, how long do we want to go, so I could look after my tyres’,”explained Vettel, who‘only’did 36 laps on the softs thanks to being lapped.“i said we’d try to make it. The last five laps were really, really difficult. Obviously it helped that we got lapped to be honest – not always the case, but today it was.”
The one-stopper helped Vettel recover from another poor qualifying, after he was knocked out in Q2 for the second race in a row. Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto, who said the radio strategy confusion was because “we prefer to talk openly, others don’t, perhaps so as not to reveal their intentions”, said Vettel’s result was down to his own performance and not the troublesome SF1000.
“I don’t think it is a strength of the car,”binotto said.“if it’s any strength, it’s a strength of the drivers first, managing all the tyres, and the engineering group managing all the data.”
Charles Leclerc looked on course to repeat his strong one-stopping performance from the preceding 70th Anniversary GP, as he eked out his first stint on the softs to lap 29 from ninth on the grid. But after a fine battle with Mclaren’s Lando Norris, Leclerc suddenly spun at the final chicane. An electrical problem had cut his power and turned him around as the stopped engine effectively acted as an anchor, and he had to tour slowly to the pits with his seat belts loose when it unexpectedly refired.