Ferrari kept Carlos Sainz Jnr’s car running after he picked up damage on the first lap of the Belgian Grand Prix as they expected a red flag during the race would give them an opportunity to repair it.
Sainz collided with Oscar Piastri at the first corner. The McLaren driver retired on the first lap but Sainz carried on despite extensive damage to the right-hand side of his floor.The preceding two days of running at Spa-Francorchamps had been disrupted by rain. Pre-race weather forecasts indicated a 40% chance of a shower during the grand prix, and some rain did fall around half-distance. However it never became strong enough to jeopardise the running of the race.
As Ferrari realised the race would not be stopped, they retired Sainz’s car shortly after the rain passed.
“We were just expecting a red flag at one stage, to be able to fix it, with the first shower,” Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur confirmed. “But when the shower came without the red flag, we decided to stop it.”
“It’s quite difficult because you are losing downforce, but it’s not just the downforce it’s the balance of the car,” he explained. “We never did the calculation of a potential lap time with its points of downforce its points of balance that, but it was a lot.”
Sainz said his car was “undriveable, pretty much,” after the collision. “But we kept it going and never gave up in case there’s a red flag. Then when the rain passed and there was no red flag we retired.”
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2023 Belgian Grand Prix
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Alex (@)
30th July 2023, 19:54
“We were just expecting a red flag … with the first shower,” Ferrari confirmed.
Because that’s perfectly normal for racing.
…
What gets me is, based on Saturday, that was actually a reasonable gamble
MichaelN
30th July 2023, 22:52
Precisely, this says more about F1’s inability to have wet weather racing than about Ferrari.
Roger Ayles (@roger-ayles)
30th July 2023, 23:14
@smallvizier They were likely expecting a red based on the Porsche race in the morning which got red flagged with 3 laps left when it started raining even though there hadn’t been an accident.
A few cars locked up and went wide at the chicane but that was it. It hadn’t even got to the point where there was any spray. It just started raining a bit harder so they called it off.
Luis
30th July 2023, 22:01
It impress me how this as absurd as it is, sounds completely normal coming from who said that.
This team has really went a long way.
Turch17 (@turch17)
31st July 2023, 2:32
It is absurd, but it makes sense in today’s F1. And I am not happy about it.
Jere (@jerejj)
31st July 2023, 6:17
Expecting an SC period is realistic, but solely expecting a red flag over anything else is rather pointless, so I didn’t think about this possibility before, especially as they expected that a mere ‘drizzle’ would cause race suspension.
BasCB (@bascb)
31st July 2023, 8:11
I get that they thought “why not wait and see”, it wouldn’t be the first time. And they didn’t lose anything from not retiring the car earlier.
drmouse (@drmouse)
31st July 2023, 10:06
TBH waiting for a red flag wasn’t an unreasonable call. At Spa, there’s a reasonable chance that there will be a major collision which damage to the barriers, especially with wet weather. It’s also not unreasonable that there could have been a major incident which took out enough cars to bring him into the points anyway.
That said, my first thought when I saw his damage was “Get the Duck Tape out!” They could have patched the car in a reasonably short amount of time and, while it would still have been compromised, it should have made it much better. However, I haven’t seen any teams using that engineering technique for quite a while…
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
5th August 2023, 7:29
Ahah, yes, I think toro rosso with tsunoda were the last ones.
ferrox glideh (@ferrox-glideh)
2nd August 2023, 3:14
Another indefensibly bad call by the scuderia. They should have just gotten on with a better strategy sooner.