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Ferrari Formula 1 driver Sebastian Vettel says his race strategy in the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix “didn’t make any sense”, as he finished the race a disappointing 12th.
Vettel had started the race on the hard tyre, and was running ninth and in clean air when he was called in for his stop.
He emerged in heavy traffic and never really broke free of it, pitting for a second time just 11 laps later and swapping a second set of hards for mediums, on which he would finish the race.
Vettel made it clear on the radio that it had not been his preference to pit as early as he had, radioing to his team: “This is the gap that we didn’t like, we spoke about it this morning. I’ll hang in there but you know you’ve messed up.”
Asked by Sky to elaborate on his comment after the race, Vettel said: “Well I mean we spoke this morning that there is no point pitting [when] knowing that we would run into traffic, and that’s exactly what we did.
“We went also on a hard tyre which we then only had on for roughly 10 laps, probably not even that, so it didn’t make any sense. I mean why would you put the hard for 10 laps and then put the medium for 20 laps?
“I was running out of tyres towards the end so we spoke about exactly that but yeah, not the best work we all could have done today.”
The strategy capped off a disappointing race for Vettel, which had taken an early hit when he spun on the opening lap while in team-mate Charles Leclerc’s wheeltracks.
Leclerc finished the race a standout fourth, having comprehensively outperformed his team-mate for a second weekend running, with Vettel badly at odds with the lower-downforce spec of the SF1000.
Asked if he felt his car was different to Leclerc, he said: “I don’t know, I mean, I guess.
“Something is there that I’m missing, I’m not sure what it is.
“Nevertheless I tried to get out of it and do as best as I can.
“For sure, today we could have been higher up. My side obviously with the spin, I’m not quite sure what happened there, but then also with strategy we could have recovered better.
“I think the main difference is we don’t have as clean races from where we start and he [Leclerc] had a couple of clean races so far.”
