Carlo Vanzini on Ferrari pit wall: "Maybe Arrivabene was right after Suzuka disaster?"

The weekend in Monaco was very disappointing for Scuderia Ferrari. In stark contrast to the optimistic statements made on Thursday (talking about pole position and victory), the team from Maranello collected a meager 12 points, with Charles Leclerc finishing in sixth place and Carlos Sainz in eighth. It was a debacle considering that the Red cars finished the race behind the Aston Martin of Fernando Alonso, the Alpine of Esteban Ocon, and both Mercedes.

What happened? In addition to an apparent mismatch between the data from the simulator and what was experienced on the track, the Ferrari pit wall made a serious mistake in qualifying, resulting in a penalty received by Charles Leclerc (for impeding Lando Norris), and their race strategy did not pay off. Italian journalist Carlo Vanzini addressed this in his analysis for the weekly magazine Autosprint.

Carlo Vanzini’s words

“It seems, even in Monaco, that the engineers have their heads immersed only in the computer monitors without taking the time to sniff the track,” Carlo Vanzini states in his analysis for the well-known weekly magazine. He then asks: “Perhaps Maurizio Arrivabene was right when, after the disaster in qualifying in Suzuka, he said we were lacking ‘track cyclists’?” The journalist is referring to the 2018 Japanese Grand Prix when the Ferrari pit wall was the only one in Q3 to send both of their cars out on intermediate tires on a mostly dry track.

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On that occasion, the manager from Brescia stated, “From what we had seen in the first two sessions, I don’t think the pole position was within our reach today. But what happened today is unacceptable. I am very angry; it’s not the first time these mistakes have happened. I don’t want to point the finger at anyone in particular, but I am very disappointed. Unlike certain situations in the past, today it was easy to understand what was happening on the track, so much so that our opponents all came out of the pits on slicks. Sometimes it’s more useful to take your eyes off the computer and look at the track, using common sense. We are a young team, and perhaps we lack the ‘track cyclists’ who, with their experience, knows how to read similar situations correctly and quickly.”

“Perhaps it cost him the leadership of the Scuderia at the end of 2018,” Carlo Vanzini emphasizes, referring to Maurizio Arrivabene’s outburst. However, today, the words spoken by the former team principal of the Prancing Horse are more relevant than ever. “That feeling is there, confirmed by Monaco where, at a certain point, you could take different risks, having nothing to lose unless you reason like a ‘provincial’ and settle,” the journalist concluded at the end of the Monaco Grand Prix.