Ferrari boss Mattia Binotto has put Charles Leclerc’s shock Q1 exit in Monaco Grand Prix qualifying down to a misjudgement.
At his home race, the 21-year-old was left in the pits as those behind gradually went faster with teammate Sebastian Vettel ultimately the driver to push Leclerc into the knockout zone.
This is just the latest strategy gaffe by the Scuderia as their 2019 season continues to be hit by disappointment.
“It is not a good day for us certainly. I think we made a mistake because of the way we made a call, that’s what happened today, nothing more,” Binotto stated.
“It has been a misjudgement, a wrong evaluation of what we call the cut-off time. [The] cut-off time is the threshold by which we believe we are comfortably into the next session, and the cut-off time is calculated real-time based on what we see on the track, based on the real-time sectors of all the competitors, on all the drivers.
“When the cut-off time is calculated, we normally add a margin on top of it and the margin is good enough to afford for any tolerances, uncertainty, or whatever might happen during the session normally.”
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However, given the unique factors in Monaco, Binotto explained why that margin was “not sufficient”.
“The first is the track improvement had been very significant and important by the end of Q1. The second is that probably our margin did not consider enough variability due to drivers’ maybe confidence by driving through Monaco,” he said.
“Certainly in Monaco, that margin needs to be increased in future no doubt. It’s not sufficient to calculate a cut-off time, to apply a margin. But in Monaco, lesson learned of today is that the margin needs to be simply bigger.”
As mentioned, it was Vettel who was the driver that caused Leclerc’s exit and it was put to Ferrari that the possible risk of the German missing the cut-off time had meant attention had strayed from the Monegasque.
“I think we’ve got the right people. I think we’ve got the right procedures, but we need to improve our tools,” Binotto claimed.
“And I think we are at least open to new opportunities of looking at what we did and how we may do that differently in the future.
“That is something we will address from the next race onwards, no doubt.”
