7 STRATEGY SHAMBLES MUST NOT RECUR
“We need to focus on ourselves,”leclerc said in Japan,
“try to execute Sunday well. Because performance is not what we lacked this year.”
The 25-year-old is famously self-critical, so he will be all too aware of how his own errors contributed to Ferrari’s stunning post-melbourne downfall. But he has also borne the brunt of its strategy shambles gifting Verstappen yet more points.
Monaco (where it must be said that Leclerc would have been better served by taking control of his own destiny on the full wets/slicks switch, as Sainz did), the Silverstone safety car call, the hard-tyre choice in Hungary. These were Ferrari’s high-profile strategy gaffes.
It wasn’t alone – look at Red Bull’s error in underfuelling Verstappen’s car for Q3 in Singapore.
But those Ferrari tactical mistakes all came in underpressure race situations and at the stage of the season where reliability and crashes were also biting. Red Bull has proved to be much more nimble and decisive in its thinking on race strategy, with its drivers’advice to avoid the hard tyres in Hungary well-heeded.
In terms of its strategy, if the personnel were not the problem (as Binotto insisted back then), then Ferrari’s operations and data-crunching were off. It has involved its drivers in strategy choices more visibly since the autumn began, and there has been a notable uptick in its calls paying off. It’s just that Red Bull has been untouchable whatever Ferrari has done, such as with its alternative two-stopper gambit for Leclerc at Monza. It also got its towing tactics in Paul Ricard qualifying spot on.
At the same time, we can see with hindsight that only the safety car stopped Mercedes’one-stopper kicking Leclerc off the Zandvoort podium, while the tyre warm-up struggles for all drivers in Singapore meant that stopping after Perez likely would have been the better approach for Ferrari once it had lost the start, since there track position was critical.
All this is what Leclerc means by executing better on race days; it’s something that Ferrari can’t afford to get wrong so often.