Fred Vasseur admits that Ferrari must find an answer to the “quite strange” problem which afflicted Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari in the Hungarian Grand Prix and led to a “disaster” final stint.
Leclerc had taken a sensational and unexpected pole position for Sunday’s race, having outqualified the quicker McLaren pairing of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris.
The Monegasque driver held the lead off the line and maintained the position until his first pit stop, but still remained ahead of Piastri who had tried the undercut strategy to move in front.
Having moved back into the lead when Norris made his sole pit stop, Leclerc dropped back into P2 after his second visit to the pit lane and was still ahead of Piastri on the same strategy.
But the Ferrari man dramatically lost pace in the final stint, being passed by both Piastri and the Mercedes of George Russell, with Leclerc handed a five-second penalty after moving under braking as the Briton overtook him.
It still left him fourth in the classification, with Leclerc having sent several furious radio messages during the race to his team, only to be told after that the car had suffered a suspected chassis issue.
Team Principal Vasseur, who also came to the defence of Lewis Hamilton after the Briton suffered a difficult weekend in Budapest, said the team needed to investigate the problem to find out exactly what went wrong.
“I must say that the situation was quite strange, that we were under control the first 40 laps of the race, that we are very in control the first stint, a bit more difficult the second one, but it was still manageable,” said Vasseur, who it was confirmed in Hungary had signed a multi-year deal to stay at Ferrari.
“And the last stint was a disaster, very difficult to drive, that balance was not there and honestly we don’t know exactly what’s happened so far.
“It means that we have to investigate if we have something broken on the chassis side or whatever, but at one stage I thought that we will never finish the race. We can be lucky in this situation to score points of a P4.
“It’s really frustrating for us because I think we did the first pole position of the season. The first two stints went pretty well, and we lost completely the pace and the pace of the weekend on the last run.”
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