Ferrari crunch talks loom to address strategy botch blasted by Charles Leclerc

Fred Vasseur has revealed Ferrari will meet this week to discuss how to resolve strategy disagreements in the future.

Charles Leclerc was furious after Ferrari’s decision not to switch him onto the softs during Q2 cost him a place in the final 10 shootout.

He took to the media to vent his frustration, saying it is not the first time such a problem has happened, and although Ferrari later claimed Leclerc changed his mind once he saw all available data, it is another moment of tension in an already tempestuous team.

Team boss Vasseur has been forced to step in and act as peacemaker, revealing that the Ferrari squad will meet on Tuesday in order to discuss the event and work out how to avoid such a public incident in the future.

“We have to think about what happened,” he said, as reported by Motorsport.com. “We will have a meeting to discuss about it on Tuesday to fix it.

“You can always do a better job. But it is true also that the [impression] that you have 10 seconds after qualifying is not always the best one.

“We had a good discussion with Charles. We gave him the global picture of the situation; what happened during the session, and it was much more calm.”

Ferrari’s logic with refusing Leclerc’s request was that by the time they had swapped to the slicks, the rain would have come and the driver would not have set any kind of lap.

“At this stage the rain was coming, and we wanted to put a time on the board as soon as possible,” Vasseur said. “If you pit at the end of lap one to put a set of softs on, then you have two laps to warm up the tyres and you postpone your first flying lap for five minutes. It was not the right strategy at this stage.”

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“I think the confusion came from the fact that he probably didn’t get the global picture of the quali and so on.

“We have probably to improve some areas so that he has to put himself in our shoes sometimes.

“We can’t say that we did a good job [in qualifying]. I think the pace was mega, but we finished 10/11. So, it means something went wrong.”

While they were disappointed in quali, it went on to be a good weekend for Ferrari with a smart strategy call securing a P4 and P5 finish.