Early stop for Vettel left him vulnerable to team-mate's late charge
Monday 8 September 2014 08:35, UK
Red Bull chief Christian Horner insists the team couldn’t have foreseen how Sebastian Vettel would lose out to team-mate Daniel Ricciardo in the Italian GP after the in-form Australian yet again overtook his World Champion team-mate to finish ahead in Sunday's race.
Despite showing signs over the summer that he is beginning to rediscover the kind of single-lap form that was a key trait of his four successive title-winning campaigns by outqualifying Ricciardo at five of the last seven events, Vettel has still only once this season beaten his team-mate on race day when both cars have finished, despite consistently running ahead at the start recently.
That mid-race turnaround happened again at Monza as Vettel, running behind the dominant Mercedes and Williams cars in fifth place into the closing laps, was overtaken by Ricciardo in swashbuckling fashion at the second chicane, the latter's car with tyres eight laps fresher.
Having initiated the pitstops with Vettel on lap 19 in order to jump McLaren’s Kevin Magnussen and Williams’s Valtteri Bottas, Horner said it was an “aggressive” strategy that made sense at the time. However, the German's tyres wilted with the longer-running Ricciardo came flying back into contention with a series of thrilling passing moves.
“We are racing against the McLarens, we were in the train with Magnussen, Jenson [Button] behind of Fernando [Alonso], and it was a question of do we go for the undercut, go for track position and then go for tyre conservation?” the Red Bull Team Principal explained.
“So we went aggressive with Seb, we went for the undercut, which he made work – he delivered the lap time and got the track position – and obviously versus the guys he was racing that worked very well.
“The decision with Daniel was dictated by [the fact that] he wasn’t in that group at the start and so the option of ‘Okay, we’ll go longer because he’s [not] going to undercut anyone so we will go as long as we can before the tyres hit the cliff and then pit to give him as fresh tyres as possible until the end of the race.
“What Daniel did with some of his overtaking was truly impressive to get himself back in contention and Sebastian’s tyres unfortunately were six laps short of keeping that position. But it was six of one, half a dozen [of the other] at the time you make that decision and you have to go with what’s in front of you.”
With Vettel behind Magnussen approaching his opening lap-18 stop, Horner insisted it made sense to prioritise track position against the Mercedes-powered cars but that the combination of Ricciardo’s bold passes and higher than expected tyre degradation on the German's RB10 meant it was his team-mate who ultimately finished fifth.
“We were reacting to what was going on around. Seb was racing in a group, racing the McLarens, he’s in a sandwich, we weren’t going to pass them on track because we didn’t have the top-end speed and as soon as Bottas passed Magnussen, rather than lose time racing with Bottas we decided ‘Okay, let’s go for it, go for the undercut and get track position’ and then it was going to be a case of tyre preservation until the end of the race,” Horner said.
“Unfortunately, versus Daniel we were just probably a little bit too aggressive but of course at that point of the race it was impossible to predict that outcome.
“We went aggressive with the strategy with Seb and we put him under pressure in the final stages because his tyres were obviously in bad condition. With Daniel he had a much better tyre on at that stage, but it was impossible to predict that at the time the pitstops were made.
“Daniel’s progress through the field was much quicker than we expected and the degradation on Seb ended up being pretty high at the end of the stint.”
The Red Bull chief added: “It wasn’t a lack of pace today [from Vettel] it was just how their two strategies worked out.”
Nonetheless, the late swapping of intra-team order didn’t affect the team’s final outcome and Horner said that the reigning champions can be more than pleased with their points haul from Monza and Spa, where Ricciardo unexpectedly won.
“I think fifth and sixth was the absolute optimum,” he claimed.
“Obviously all the cars ahead of us are Mercedes and mainly all the cars behind us are Mercedes–powered. When you consider the last two races Spa and here, which are predominantly power dominated, I think we have actually extracted everything and more we could have hoped for.”
