Ferrari sporting and strategy director Iñaki Rueda has explained the thinking behind the Maranello team’s decision to change Charles Leclerc to a two-stop strategy last weekend at the Monza circuit in the 2022 Formula 1 Italian Grand Prix.
The Ferrari driver started from P1 thanks to a great lap in the qualifying session on Saturday and kept his first place after a close duel with the Mercedes of George Russell in the first corner. However, after just six laps, the Monegasque driver already followed by Max Verstappen, despite the fact that the Red Bull driver started from seventh place on the grid.
When Sebastian Vettel was forced to stop his Aston Martin car on the side of the track at the second Lesmo due to a power unit issue, Scuderia Ferrari immediately saw this moment as an opportunity to take advantage of the virtual safety car in the early stages of the Italian Grand Prix: Charles Leclerc was called back to the pits to mount the mediums and therefore switched to an alternate two-stop strategy, while Max Verstappen continued his race on the more conventional one-stop, aware he would have the pace to complete the race with just one stop.
“On lap 11, we had an opportunity to pit under the virtual safety car. Our pre-race numbers told us this race would be an easy one-stop race featuring soft and medium tyres. The two-stop race was 10 seconds slower. A pit stop under a virtual safety car is nine seconds less costly than a normal pit stop. So we had a window of opportunity where we said we can offset ourselves onto a two-stop with a shorter VSC pit stop, or stay on the conventional one-stop. After the VSC, we understood on paper that Charles would finish four or five seconds behind Verstappen, but we persevered, we kept on trying to execute the perfect two-stop and we were hoping that towards the end of the race there would be a VSC or safety car period from which we could profit.” – Iñaki Rueda explained, in his post-Italian Grand Prix debrief.
There was another moment Ferrari hoped to be able to capitalize on, as the safety car was deployed late in the race due to an engine failure suffered by Daniel Ricciardo, but eventually the neutralisation led to the Italian Grand Prix finishing behind the safety car, much to the disappointment of the fans:
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“Typically, a safety car lasts around three to four laps, so we expected two to three laps of racing after the safety car period. What happened was the safety car came out of the pits and picked up Russell, which was the third car. The normal procedure is that this car is let by by a green light on top of the safety car and this car goes around the track following a safety car reference lap, a reference lap the FIA gives so we drive slowly and safely around the track to not endanger the crews that are retrieving the car that has a problem. The safety car held Russell for five minutes, crucially, three laps behind them. This ate up too much of the remaining laps of the race and by the time the safety car let the field go by to reorganise themselves, we had no more laps to finish the race.” – Ferrari sporting and strategy director Iñaki Rueda concluded.
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