Laurence Edmondson
SHANGHAI — Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur has labelled Formula 1’s select broadcasting of team radio messages “a joke” after a false narrative emerged around Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc swapping positions at the Chinese Grand Prix.
In the first 20 laps of the race, Leclerc was bottled up behind teammate Hamilton but unable to get close enough to make a pass.
Realising he was impeding his Leclerc’s progress, Hamilton radioed the pit wall to say, “I think I’m going to let Charles go because I’m struggling.”
That message was not broadcast on the world feed, which is controlled by Formula 1, but the following messages, including Hamilton’s rejection of a call to swap at Turn 14, were broadcast.
The messages that did play out on the TV feed made it sound like Hamilton was against the idea even though he was the one who initiated the process of the swap.
Leclerc eventually passed Hamilton into Turn 1 on Lap 21 and finished the race ahead of him before both cars were disqualified in a post-race investigation. Ferrari admitted to “mistakes” saying there was no intention to gain an advantage.
Asked to explain what happened with the radio calls, Vasseur said: “I think this is a joke from FOM because the first call came from Lewis.
“Lewis asked us to swap, but to create the mess around the situation they broadcast only the second part of the question. We will discuss with them.”
Speaking before Ferrari’s disqualification from the results, Vasseur said the majority of questions posed to him after the race were about the team orders on a day when he said the drivers had collaborated.
“You can’t imagine the number of questions I had about this when I came from the garage to here,” he said. “It’s all about the same thing: ‘Is it a mess?’ I said no, it’s Lewis who asked to swap.
“I’m not even sure you would even have these situations ten times at other teams in a season, and honestly from the pit wall we really appreciated the call from Lewis saying, ‘guys, I’m losing the pace, I’m keen to swap’.
“It took us one lap to ask him to swap with Charles and then the pace was back. He said ‘oh let’s stay like this for a little bit’ and we said ‘no, if you up the pace we swap’.
Pit-to-car radio communications appeared to be an issue during the first race at the Australian Grand Prix, but Hamilton denied there were any problems between him and his new race engineer Riccardo Adami.
Vasseur added: “As a team the collaboration between the two guys is mega and I can’t complain a single second about something. I understand the question, but you have to ask the question to Stefano and not me because I’m not in charge of the broadcast.”
A spokesperson for Formula 1 said in response: “There was absolutely no intention of presenting a misleading narrative regarding the Ferrari team radio. Due to other situations developing during the race the message from Lewis was not played but this was not intentional.”
