An accident between Pierre Gasly and Lando Norris towards the end of the inaugural Miami test in Formula 1 brought about the appearance of the safety car, and seemed to give Ferrari a golden opportunity to risk and go for victory.
When the race management chose to bring out the Safety Car instead of its virtual version, the race leader, Max Verstappen, had already passed the pit lane, while the two Ferraris, Charles Leclerc’s and Carlos Sainz, they had not yet done so.
That meant the door was open for either or both of them to get into the pitlane to fit new tyres, which would have given them a good lead in the final laps.
Surprisingly for Red Bull, the Maranello team kept their cars on a more punishing compound than the Mexican, with their boss, Christian Horner , saying: “Ferrari had left us a bit offside by going from a virtual safety car to a Safety Car”.
“Max [Verstappen] had already gone through the pitlane entrance, while Ferrari would have had a free stop, but they didn’t do it with any of their cars. We’re grateful for that, because I think if they had put on soft tires we would have been third. today,” he explained.
Ferrari , for its part, has indicated that the situation was not so simple, since it was not just about losing a golden opportunity to try to go for victory. Leclerc and Sainz were severely limited in their compound options, with neither having a new set of mediums or softs available.
The two could change to the hard ones, but the head of the Prancing Horse team, Mattia Binotto , considered that this would have been worse than continuing with the worn ones.
“We thought that in terms of heating, a used tire would have been better than a new one,” he said. “We would have suffered more in the warm-up with an unused hard drive, which was the one we had within our reach in the garage, so we decided to stay out because we thought it was the best opportunity to get warm and attack when it resumed, which is what what happened”.
“I think that the best option for Charles [Leclerc] was right on the first lap after the safety car, and he was close at that moment. For Carlos [Sainz] too, who defended himself against Checo with the new means,” assured the Swiss.
The Spanish driver himself supported this decision by Ferrari not to stop, despite the fact that he had to overcome a rather difficult situation, keeping Pérez at bay behind him.
“I knew I was going to pit, because I had a new medium,” he said. “Our alternative was a used soft, or a new hard, which to me, both weren’t good for 10 or 12 laps,” he said.
“I think it was the right decision because in the end we managed to keep him behind, but he was tight, he had everything, everything to get past me. I’m a little surprised that we stayed there, because it was a very close battle,” said the Ferrari driver from Madrid.
