Red Bull understands Charles Leclerc’s early tyre change and says the RB18, with its “tremendous” pace, would have won with any strategy
The Red Bull team can understand why Ferrari brought Charles Leclerc into the pits for a tyre change on the twelfth lap during the virtual safety car, which was triggered by Sebastian Vettel’s retirement
Both the Monegasque and Max Verstappen started the Italian Grand Prix on the soft soft tyres and the Dutchman was able to stalk the Ferrari driver from seventh on the grid in no time.
Before the virtual safety car period, the gap between Leclerc and Verstappen was just 1.5 seconds, so Ferrari took the opportunity to change tyres to save time. However, the VSC phase ended a little too early for Leclerc, so that he was no longer able to take the complete time advantage into the pit lane.
Red Bull confirmed: Would have changed if Leclerc had stayed out
Red Bull were also ready in the pit lane at this point to bring Verstappen in, but they decided to go with an opposite strategy to Ferrari. Asked if the Dutchman would have come in if Leclerc had stayed out, team boss Christian Horner says: “Yes.”
Therefore, he is not surprised by Ferrari giving up track position with the pit stop: “No, we understand why they did that. Strategically, they made a good decision. I think we just had a faster car today and would have won the race regardless. “
“They told me [on the radio] to do the opposite to Charles,” Verstappen confirmed of the situation during the virtual safety car. “So it could have gone either way today, I guess. “
Ferrari’s pace just not good enough?
However, Leclerc’s second stint on the fresh medium tyres wasn’t exactly convincing with his pace either, as he made up little ground on Verstappen at the front on old soft tyres. When the Red Bull driver finally came in for a tyre change on lap 25 as well and Leclerc took the lead, Verstappen was able to show off his pace on new tyres.
The world champion took about a second off Leclerc per lap, with a gap after the pit stop of about ten seconds. Extrapolating, Verstappen could have easily overtaken the Ferrari driver on the track, but the Ferrari decision was made to bring Leclerc into the pits for a second change to fresh soft tyres on lap 33.
But even Leclerc’s performance on this tyre was not good enough to threaten Verstappen. He was only able to reduce a 20-second gap after the pit stop to 17 seconds by the time of the final safety car period at the end of the race.
Horner: “Had a tremendous pace “
“I think we’ve refined the car and we’ve managed to understand the car pretty well,” Horner said after Verstappen’s fifth win in a row. “We made a few compromises in qualifying because we knew we were going to take a penalty and that paid off because I think we were very quick today and had tremendous pace.”
According to Horner, the decisive factor for the ultimately unchallenged Red Bull victory was Verstappen’s good start: “Max was already in P3 at the end of the first lap and a few laps later he was already second before he then closed the gap on Charles.”
“Then at the end they switched to two stops on Charles, but even on the soft tyre his pace was not enough to catch him compared to Max on medium. So we were certainly in control of the race,” said the Red Bull team boss.
Horner regrets end behind safety car
When Daniel Ricciardo rolled out in his McLaren shortly before the end of the race, all the top drivers switched to soft tyres for the final sprint, which Horner regrets did not happen.
“We had a new set of tyres that we had saved up [in qualifying] and we expected to be able to restart the race because the incident looked pretty harmless.
But the race wasn’t restarted and it was disappointing not to win in race conditions because that pretty much goes against everything we’ve been talking about over the last few years. But it’s great to get that win and it puts Max in a great position. “
Verstappen: “Were the fastest on every compound “
“We had a great race, we were fastest on every compound,” Verstappen confirmed what his team boss had said. “And the tyre degradation was very good, so we had a really good race car. In the end I was able to control the gap.”
“Of course, it helped a lot that I had a great first lap and was able to get away from most of the cars before they, let’s say, got into a DRS move. From then on, both sets of tyres felt great and I was able to extend the first stint a bit. And everything worked very well on the mediums as well. “
