A tough day

Scuderia Ferrari HP had a difficult time of it in the Miami Grand Prix. Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton came home seventh and eighth, having spent the entire race fighting in traffic in a train of cars all with DRS. Rain had been expected but there was no sign of it during the race so that reduced the opportunities to move up the order. Therefore, the team leaves Florida with 16 points, ten from today and six from yesterday’s Sprint.

The race. Charles started on Medium tyres, Lewis on the Hards, maintaining their eighth and twelfth places off the grid, before the Englishman soon moved up to eleventh, passing Isack Hadjar and on lap 22 he moved into the points, getting ahead of Esteban Ocon. Leclerc remained stuck in a queue of cars. The team made the most of the Virtual Safety Car after Oliver Bearman had to park his car, to call in the drivers for their only pit stop. Hamilton, further down the order, pitted on lap 28, making the most of the VSC, but Leclerc had to wait one more lap, so his stop cost a bit more time. Once the entire field had pitted, the SF-25s found themselves in line astern, in eighth and ninth places. On lap 34, Charles passed Carlos Sainz and as the Spaniard ran wide, Lewis also nipped by to be eighth behind his team-mate. In the closing stages, the team tried to set off in pursuit of Kimi Antonelli in the Mercedes, swapping its drivers’ positions twice, but it was not enough to catch the Italian and so, Charles and Lewis took the chequered flag in seventh and eighth places respectively.

Time for the European season.  After six races in three continents, Formula 1 is finally heading for Europe with the next round being the Made in Italy e dell’Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix at Imola in a fortnight’s time. 

Charles Leclerc #16

It has been a tough weekend for us. Over the last three races, we have made some good progress, but I just didn’t have that same feeling in the car this weekend and we need to understand why.

Today, our pace wasn’t there on the first stint, then on the second stint I was managing at the start, after which I had to run in dirty air. I pushed again towards the end, but it just wasn’t enough.

I will continue to always give everything I’ve got and we have to come together as a team and work on making more progress.

Lewis Hamilton #44

Overall, we’ve made some solid steps forward this weekend. P8 isn’t where we aim to be of course, and there are definitely learnings to take moving forward, but considering where we started it was a decent recovery. 

I’m starting to feel more at one with the car, which is encouraging, and I’m as motivated as ever to be fighting at the front. We’re still lacking a bit of pace, but everyone is working incredibly hard behind the scenes and we’re hopeful of making progress in the coming races. We’ll just keep pushing and stay focused on the work ahead.

Fred Vasseur 
Team Principal Scuderia Ferrari HP

We didn’t quite get the balance right this weekend, particularly yesterday in qualifying and then today we struggled in the middle of the group with little chance to secure a better result than this. When we were in free air, we were close to Mercedes and Red Bull in terms of pace. After a race like this there’s obviously a sense of frustration, but we need to stay focused and keep working hard in order to address the issues, dealing with our limitations step by step. 

On the strategy front, our calls were right: we pitted both our drivers under the Virtual Safety Car and this allowed Lewis to run behind Charles at the restart. Then we swapped the cars as soon as we were sure we were not putting Charles at risk from the cars behind, as Lewis was on Medium tyres and we wanted to try and catch Kimi Antonelli. It didn’t work so we reversed the call at the end as per our standard procedure.