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Ferrari’s pace, not their strategy, was the cause of their struggles in the Austrian Grand Prix, said team principal Frederic Vasseur.
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The team which won the previous race in Spain qualified strongly in Austria, Charles Leclerc taking second on the grid ahead of Lewis Hamilton.
However both cars finished outside the top four places, Hamilton taking fifth while Leclerc sank to eighth. They were the only cars among the top four teams to make three pit stops, but Vasseur is convinced that was not the cause of their problems.
“The strategy is not the issue,” he said. “I think the issue is that we didn’t have the pace of Mercedes and Verstappen.
“We tried to compensate, taking risks on the strategy, but it was not a good fight, I think. It’s more a matter of pace and we pay also the poor Friday that we had also.”
Hamilton, who won in Spain, finished 26 seconds behind race-winner George Russell. He ran second early on but reported a strong shift in balance before making his first pit stop.
Later in the race his race engineer told him to switch to a different engine mode to manage high temperatures. Vasseur suspects the team tried too hard to keep up with the front-runners and ended up “overheating and destroying everything” as a result.
“I think compared to McLaren, we were there, but compared to Mercedes and Max, it was more difficult,” he said. “We over-pushed probably the first couple of laps to stay with them and we destroyed a bit everything.”
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