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Talk of Ferrari’s “duty” to help Sebastian Vettel rapidly turned into a blame game and a question of “sacrifice” at Silverstone. Formula 1’s most famous team and the four-time world champion once tipped to restore its glory days are in the final throes of a fractured relationship in which each side is failing the other.
Vettel screwed up in the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix with his latest mistake. Ferrari screwed up with a strategy blunder that contained Vettel’s recovery to 12th. Vettel told his engineer in no uncertain terms that “you know you messed up”. Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto countered on Italian television that spinning at the first corner did more damage than any strategy call thereafter.
This friendly fire occurred less than 24 hours after Ferrari’s sporting director Laurent Mekies had fielded questions about Vettel’s ongoing pace deficit and Vettel’s assertion that he has hit a “wall” with car performance and laptime, with Mekies insisting it was Ferrari’s responsibility to help its driver as much as possible.
The most fractious moment occurred a few laps before mid-distance in the grand prix when Vettel was about to be caught by team-mate Charles Leclerc, who had already made his first pitstop. Vettel wanted to extend his stint but Ferrari called him into the pits. He rejoined in traffic and was deeply unhappy, telling his team this is exactly what he warned them would happen and they had agreed pre-race needed to be avoided.
Vettel’s race was already badly compromised by his error, and made worse by that call – which appears to have been made to remove Vettel from Leclerc’s path. Not wanting Vettel to hold up Leclerc is fine. But if this was the solution, it’s a sad indication of how bad the situation is at Ferrari that the team fears a lack of cooperation on-track.
“We are not sacrificing Seb,” Binotto insisted afterwards. “We thought at the time it would make no difference to him stopping earlier or later.
“I think reviewing all the data, eventually by leaving Seb on track we may have left at least the one-stop strategy open to him as well. We didn’t.
“It’s not a matter of sacrificing Seb or not. We always said that maximising the team’s points is the first priority.”
Unfortunately for Vettel that means he is not first priority, because only once in five races has he been the driver in position to bank a decent result. He must take a large part of the responsibility for that. Repeated mistakes are consistently hurting a once-prodigious reputation. This time he cut the first corner too aggressively, possibly distracted by a Leclerc lock-up in front and/or the Red Bull of Alex Albon on his outside, had a tankslapper and half-spun to the inside.
“I had a very good start and then I wanted to stay out of trouble and cut a little bit the inside and I think initially it felt like somebody touched,” said Vettel.
“But I think I got surprised on the kerb and lost the car there obviously.
“I compromised my race a lot, and from there I had to come back. It would have been a better day without that.”
At that point, Vettel’s best hope was of sneaking a point or two. A perfect Ferrari strategy probably would have achieved that. So, Ferrari’s actions probably meant it failed to maximise its points – unless Vettel had obstructed Leclerc in a way that prevented Leclerc’s impressive march to fourth on an unexpected one-stop strategy.
But Vettel’s error was worse, which might be why he drew the line at biting on the suggestion he was now just a pawn to be sacrificed as required.
“It’s obviously not the best run for me at the moment but I trust the team I have around me and everybody in the garage so I’m fairly open-minded,” he said. “I don’t want to get into any of this. I’m fairly open-minded for the next race.
“I don’t think it can get much worse from where I am. It will get better.”
If it doesn’t then the chance, or at least the questions, of Vettel’s exit being fast-tracked will only increase. Things seem bitter. He ignored Binotto’s offer of sympathy over the radio after the British GP, and while it would be a step too far to call last weekend’s blame game a war of words it hints at further dissent.
This is all happening because Vettel’s been dumped as Ferrari’s lost faith in him, a decision that looks justified on 2020 results alone. He’s struggling on track and getting sucked into the sort of negative spiral that brings the worst out of him – think 2014 at Red Bull alongside Daniel Ricciardo, or a difficult second year with Ferrari in 2016, or the run of errors that dumped him out of title contention in 2018.
Across two weeks at Silverstone Vettel was not on Leclerc’s level. Ferrari accidentally made sure of that in the first week with botched reliability and preparation that seriously compromised Vettel’s practice time on a weekend it brought a low-downforce package that doesn’t play to his strengths either.
But Vettel reckons from Saturday of the British GP to the end of the Anniversary GP, a relatively undisrupted run save for his engine failure late in FP2, he “was not able to make any progress” in performance terms.
There was a slight deviation in downforce levels, presumably adding a small amount on Vettel’s car to give him the confidence he lacked last weekend, and that resulted in a better feeling for Vettel behind the wheel. But it didn’t translate into a notable laptime gain relative to Leclerc.
“Around the lap, it seems like a fairly even loss and mostly I struggled in the slower-speed and medium-speed corners,” said Vettel. “It’s something that we didn’t get on top of.”
A deficit of around three tenths to Leclerc, which is what Vettel seemed to have in general, isn’t all that surprising though, or a sign of anything particularly wrong beyond Vettel just not having as much confidence as Leclerc.
Silverstone’s a long lap with a punishing mix of corners. The difference only needs to be a few hundredths of a second to add up dramatically over a dozen or so proper corners.
So when one driver is absolutely on it, as Leclerc has been, and another is even a fraction off, as Vettel has been, it’s no great surprise or disgrace for the gap to be the size it’s been, at least over one lap. And that tallies with Vettel generally being more competitive in race trim, when the car is more settled – he even said that “maybe it didn’t show in the performance in qualifying, but I think in the race we were a bit more competitive”.
Which brings us back to Vettel’s mistake, and Ferrari compounding it. Vettel dropped himself into traffic and ruined any chance of a sensible race trying to pick off the cars he could fight with. Ferrari reinforced the misery by dropping him out of clear and back into a pack. It also put him on mindlessly short stint on hard tyres, then a 19-lap stint on mediums at the end.
There’s therefore no way of directly comparing Vettel’s race with Leclerc’s because it became completely different. While Leclerc was able to focus on his own pace and manage his tyres to the point he executed that one-stop strategy and finished 10 seconds behind the second Mercedes, Vettel was forced to run at the pace of those around him.
And it further exposed the weakness he has in battle because he made very, very slow work of even clearing the Alfa Romeos, Haases and Williamses of this world. No wonder when he was behind the likes of Carlos Sainz Jr’s McLaren he reached into his bag of tricks and found it was empty.
“Starting hopefully a bit further up, we should have a clean race and a more normal race,” he said. And Vettel can realistically aspire to be closer to Leclerc on other circuits.
He outqualified Leclerc in the second Austria race and again in Hungary, where he was a solid sixth (although should have been fifth without a late error that let Albon past). So, it’s not that Vettel’s been hopelessly lost at every race thus far, and that reinforces the feeling there wasn’t something fundamentally wrong – Silverstone was simply an exaggerated manifestation of a small difference in performance between the two drivers.
Mekies has hailed Vettel’s mentality for persevering despite being “very uncomfortable” with the car through the first weekend and said he is “second to none” in fighting spirit and being “as constructive as one can be in trying to understand how to move to the next thing”.
“It’s our duty now to try to do anything we can to support him and to make sure that we convert the better car into lap time,” said Mekies. “He’s a massive asset for the team and we can’t leave him behind.”
And Ferrari’s willingness to pursue whatever Vettel needs includes being open to a chassis change.
“It’s something we didn’t discuss so far,” said Binotto. “I think we are open to it if it is something that may help or not.
“Whatever we can to do to help is important to us, for Sebastian, because from a team and driver point of view we try to get better in the next races, it is important.
“I’m open to it. I will leave it to the driver and the team to discuss on their side.”
A gain of a tenth or two in qualifying is a realistic target but it’s also about as much as Vettel and Ferrari can endeavour to find, given Leclerc’s almost certainly operating very close to the car’s maximum.
Vettel’s not going to suddenly vault clear of the midfield entirely, and that problem area is what brings out the worst in him and his team – he’s prone to errors, and Ferrari’s strategy is rarely bulletproof. So, better qualifying performances will be of minimal benefit if he and Ferrari conspire to be destructive to his chances on-track.
There’s little doubt Vettel will have stronger weekends than this. The concern is what added damage the last couple of weeks have done and, if it really is just a matter of incompatibility with this car on some circuits, what happens the next time Vettel struggles.
Silverstone proved that when things are bad, they are very bad, and it took the strain on the faltering Vettel/Ferrari relationship to a new level.
He says things can’t get any worse than this weekend. If he’s wrong, the question will not be how Vettel saves his season. It’ll be whether he even wants to see it to the finish.
