The errors of Ferrari in Monaco explained

This is one of the biggest blunders of the early season. In Monaco, Ferrari completely missed their race. Leading with their two drivers, the strategy enforced by the team allowed Red Bull to take the lead and third place, when victory seemed almost impossible for them.

In a video posted on LinkedIn, the Sports Director and Strategy Director, Iñaki Rueda, asserts that there have been two errors made in the pits by the Scuderia.

With Carlos Sainz, we realized very late in his lap that we couldn’t cover Pérez. With Charles, we had a big lead and thought we could cover Pérez. At the beginning of the 18th lap, Charles had over ten seconds’ advantage over Pérez, and we thought this lead was going to diminish because Pérez, on intermediate tires, was much faster than Charles on wet tires.

We watched the others, we had live data from the cars, and we thought that this gap would go from ten seconds to five, four, three at worst. When Charles passed by the swimming pool, the last timing reference indicated that he was going to come out one second ahead of Pérez. What we didn’t expect was for Pérez to go nine seconds faster on this lap. Because of that, we lost the victory with Charles.

A little later, Ferrari called its drivers to change their tires, but a miscalculation by the strategists cost Charles Leclerc a little more time because he was too close to his teammate when diving into the pit lane.

« We tried at the last second to tell Charles to stay on track, but it was too late, he had already entered the pit lane. And during that pit stop, Charles lost two seconds. It was crucial. This is what allowed Verstappen to come out ahead of Charles one lap later », confirms Iñaki Rueda.

With these mistakes, Ferrari has lost ground on its championship rival as there are 36 points separating these two teams. Instead of scoring 43 points (28 + 18), only 30 points were added to the scoreboard.