Charles Leclerc withdrawn, Ferrari ‘in shock’: Vasseur is clear

An extremely negative debut, even beyond the worst expectations.

Ferrari extremely disappointed at the end of the Bahrain Grand Prix, finished by Carlos Sainz in fourth place (behind the two Red Bulls and also Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin) but especially marked by the retirement of Charles Leclerc. And it was precisely this news that left Frederic Vasseur stunned, who even said he was baffled by the failure of the Monegasque’s Red.

“I did not think that reliability would turn out to be one of the problems we have to deal with,” Vasseur explained to the microphones of ‘Sky Sport.’ For us in Ferrari this is a shock. And before drawing any conclusions we need to understand exactly what happened to Leclerc’s car. Meanwhile, we know that tire degradation was higher than with Red Bull, even with softs. And by fitting two sets of soft tires we were perhaps too optimistic.”

“In qualifying we manage, and the pace is not bad,” Vasseur still explained. “However, now we have to accept a result that is far from good. With Leclerc we were fighting for the third podium, which was absolutely within our reach. But now we have to deal with this reliability problem, which is absolutely not good and will have to be fixed.”