by VALERIO BARRETTA
F1 Austria, Vasseur bitter after Sprint Qualifying
Carlos’s fifth place Sainz and the tenth of Charles Leclerc are certainly not the best premise for the rebirth of Ferrari that Frederic Vasseur hoped to see this weekend. And not so much for the result itself, but for the way it came about: the Spaniard was half a second behind Max Verstappen on pole, and things went even worse for #16, who engaged the anti-stall in the pit lane, restarting the engine when it was already too late to complete the SQ3 lap.
Vasseur’s words
“We inserted the anti-stall in the pit lane, the procedure was a bit long. We were in the queue and Charles had to put the car on the right side, this canceled the procedure“, Vasseur explained to Sky Sport F1.
The Frenchman can only be disappointed by today’s result, which forces Ferrari to make a comeback in a short race: “The performance itself was a bit bad, but we have to check the data. We were at least fighting with Mercedes and McLaren, but I’m a bit disappointed for having one car in tenth position and the other in fifth, while in the previous sessions we were third or fourth, or at most fourth or fifth, so it’s disappointing“.
For the SF-24 also bouncing problems already encountered at Montmeló: “Without a doubt the hopping never helps, and if it is there it needs to be fixed, but in this type of curves and with these kerbs I’m not sure that ours is the one that suffers the most, if we compare the cars. In any case it needs to be fixed because it certainly makes you lose a lot of time“, he added. “It is not possible to quantify how much it can cause in terms of time lost on the flying lap: there was the same phenomenon in Barcelona too, but it was also partly due to the overheating of the tires. The strategy for tomorrow is to push, because there are no pit stops and I don’t think we’ll even have a choice of compound. The only strategy will be to go fast and get back into the points“.
