13/06/2016
NEWS STORY
Sebastian Vettel has defended his team over strategy that cost him Montreal win.
A start that seemed to catch the Mercedes duo asleep was squandered by a series of mistakes, some of them down to the drivers, most down to team strategy.
When the Virtual Safety Car was deployed following Jenson Button's power unit detonation, Ferrari instantly pitted the German. However, as he entered the pitlane the VSC was withdrawn, and by now, just 16 laps into the race, the team was committed to a two-stop strategy.
Whilst a number of other teams also chose to go for two stops, Mercedes didn't, allowing Lewis Hamilton to take his consecutive win and leave Ferrari still waiting on its first of the season.
"We overestimated the degradation of the tyres," admitted team boss Maurizio Arrivabene. "That's the reason why we called him in and it was the wrong decision."
Asked what changes are needed in terms of the team's continuing strategic errors, the Italian's face reddened. "We don't have to make the story bigger than it is," he said. "Today we made a mistake, in other races everybody makes mistakes. The big one is when you lose for this thing."
However, other than a pair of errant seagulls, Vettel wasn't in the mood to blame anyone and defended his team's call.
"I'm not a big fan of blaming anyone or anything," said the German. "We've had a difficult start to the season because we were never really able to show the true performance of the car, and this was maybe the first clean weekend.
"Lewis was a bit too quick, that was the issue," he continued. "I think we had a great weekend. Fantastic start and then lap one was a bit hairy and I struggled to stop the car for the last corner.
"I was pushing all race. We committed fairly early to a different strategy, which we were planning to come back. Obviously then Lewis was able to stay out and see what the tyres are doing, and probably the tyres lasted a bit better than what we expected. That made it quite tricky on fresher tyres to close the gap, but overall it was a great weekend for us.
"We struggled a little bit the last couple of races, but now we see the car has performance and we unleashed it... it was a really fun race."
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