Ferrari team principal Fred Vassuer admitted that the team made a mistake to leave Leclerc out on one one-stop strategy in Austin GP.

Although he started from pole, Charles Leclerc lost out in the opening of the race to both Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton. On top of this, he was the only driver to try a one-stop.

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Hopeful it would work, the Monagasque slowly fell back losing position to Ferrari teammate, Carlos Sainz, and Sergio Perez to finish sixth.

Despite this, his position became irrelevant when disqualified for a plank infringement.

When asked about the disqualification, Vassuer professed the team got it wrong on Sunday in Austin.

He said:

“Clearly we have mixed feelings. Because on one side of the garage with Carlos, we did pretty well.

Starting P4, and finishing P4, we finished two or three seconds behind Norris, and I think everything went well.

With Charles, who was 10 seconds in front of Carlos after 12 laps, we committed for one-stop, and it was not a good choice, it’s obvious.

“We didn’t have a clear picture about this before the race, we were a bit hesitating, and he was a bit hesitating into the first stint, pushing or not pushing. And we made a mistake.”

Honest to the team’s mistakes, Vassuer said the team had expected the grid to be split 50-50 in Strategy decisions.

While several teams had made plans for a one-stop strategy, including Mercedes, all decided against it after experiencing severe tyre degradation.

“Each time that someone is overtaking you, you are losing two seconds.”

Vassuer was keen to stress that the change in strategies by other teams actually made life worse for Leclerc. He said:

“What was even more difficult with Charles was that everybody committed for the two stops.

“It means that you have much more traffic around you, because it’s not that everybody’s doing the same race as you, and you have a clean race, as you are not in the sequence, the guys are overtaking you one or two times.

“And each time that someone is overtaking you, you are losing two seconds.

“It means that when you have these two times, four guys, you are losing eight times 1.5 seconds, it’s 12 seconds for the traffic, and the picture of what users are doing. But it’s a mistake.”

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Vassuer added that he believed the team was too in-between strategies. However, he did not want to speculate on what Leclerc could have done on a better strategy.

He said:

“For sure you can redo the race and imagine he was six or seven seconds ahead of Sainz, and Leclerc would have done this or this.

“But I think it’s not the right approach, we have to be focused on the mistake, to try to understand why you did the choice, because we were convinced that it was the good one, with the elements that we had at this stage.

“It means that the numbers that we had on the pitwall, and at the factory at this stage of the race, were not good ones.”

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