“I want the team to dare, no one should be afraid to take some risks. I won’t be the one pointing fingers if we make mistakes.” Frederic Vasseur has made this vision one of the guidelines of his management, and today in the qualifying session for the Belgian Grand Prix, it was the approach that made the difference.
The weather forecasts before the qualifying were quite clear: it would be a session for intermediate tires but with a question mark regarding the intensity of the rain. And so it was, with small variations in track conditions that were hardly visible but still important in a session that, despite being held on the longest track in the 2024 Formula 1 championship, was played (behind the Red Bull of Max Verstappen, who dominated but was out of the running for pole position) on a knife-edge.
In Q1, Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc finished in fifth and sixth positions respectively. The session was more complicated than expected, with nineteen drivers (the exception is easy to identify) having to use two sets (out of the four available) of intermediate tires.
With the two remaining sets, it became crucial to pass Q2 with just one set, a mission accomplished by the Ferrari drivers as well as by the McLaren and Mercedes tandems. In Q3, with only twelve minutes available, both McLaren and Mercedes chose to immediately hit the track with their last new set of intermediates, but Ferrari opted for a first run with a used set.
A risk, because if the rain had increased or if there had been a yellow flag in the final minutes, the price paid would have been the fourth row on the starting grid. Conversely, and this is what happened, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz had the opportunity to be the last to hit the track with a new set of tires, which offered a bit more grip on the racing line. Of course, it also required the ability to perform at the crucial moment, all in one lap.
Charles Leclerc stepped up. He improved by two-tenths in the first sector compared to Q2, a tenth and a half in the third, but above all, the Monegasque driver put together all his best partials, achieving a result that very few (or perhaps it would be better to say no one) would have bet on the day before. In the eleven thousandths that allowed Charles Leclerc to surpass Sergio Perez and secure pole position, there is a team performance; everything in the Scuderia’s box today was done in the best possible way.
Only Carlos Sainz’s performance was missing, as he will start from seventh position tomorrow. The Spaniard finished both Q1 and Q2 ahead of his Maranello teammate, but at the crucial moment, something didn’t work. Right out of ‘Source,’ Carlos Sainz’s SF-24 car struggled a lot with traction.
“I just had one difficult run,” commented Carlos, “and unfortunately, it was the final one, the one that counted. I did well in the rest of the session, felt comfortable with the car, and felt very confident; I think I did some really good laps. Then, for some reason, with the last set of tires, I had a lot of trouble getting them up to temperature. I’ll talk to my engineers to try to understand what happened.” – he pointed out at the end of the qualifying session for the Belgian Grand Prix.
Tomorrow will be another story, but it’s not certain that the forty-four laps of the race will necessarily bring less good news for Ferrari. “We don’t have a magic wand,” Charles Leclerc emphasized, “the feedback from the race simulations we saw yesterday remains the same even after the good qualifying.” However, the cards are very shuffled, and starting from pole position is a small insurance for the initial stages of the race. Much will depend on the track conditions, the ambient temperatures, and how the standings take shape after the first few laps. But after qualifying, predicting a Ferrari podium is a much less risky bet than it was before the Belgian weekend.
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