Charles Leclerc left the Madring with no regrets about Ferrari's strategic gamble in the Spanish Grand Prix, while Fred Vasseur left with the rather more tantalising conviction that Ferrari had been sitting on a potential race-winning package.
The two views neatly summed up the Italian outfit’s Spanish Grand Prix: there was frustration, certainly, but little sense that the team had simply thrown away a result.
Leclerc spent an unlikely 32 of the race's 57 laps at the front after Ferrari committed to an aggressive hard-tyre strategy, effectively gambling on a late Safety Car that would allow him to stop without surrendering too much track position.
Unfortunately, that moment never came.
With George Russell closing into pit-stop range and the hoped-for neutralisation refusing to materialise, Ferrari eventually brought Leclerc in on lap 48. He emerged fourth and had little time left to alter the outcome.
Yet rather than second-guessing the call, the Monegasque was adamant that Ferrari had made the most logical choice available.
"I think we did the right thing honestly. If I had to do the race again I would re-do exactly the same thing in terms of strategy," said Leclerc.
"Starting on the soft and doing a soft-hard would have brought me to P4 anyway. Doing a hard-soft, I was just hoping for a Safety Car at the right moment for us at the end, but that never really happened.
"A bit of a shame but at the end we were relying on a bit of the luck and we didn't have it."
Ferrari rolled the dice — but the dice stayed cold
There was certainly an element of calculated risk in Ferrari's approach.
With overtaking notoriously difficult around the new Madrid circuit, track position was precious, while the hard tyre offered Leclerc the opportunity to stay out deep into the race and wait for something – anything – to shake up the order. But nothing did.
Instead, the strategy became a waiting game in which Leclerc needed either a Safety Car or another significant interruption to transform his long stint into a genuine victory opportunity.
©Ferrari
The Scuderia also had to contend with a second car that never got the chance to play its part. Lewis Hamilton retired on lap seven with a brake problem, compounding a weekend in which Ferrari had already struggled to extract enough performance from qualifying.
Leclerc and Hamilton had started fourth and fifth respectively, less than two-tenths away from poleman Lando Norris, but neither Ferrari had quite possessed the outright Saturday pace required to put itself higher up the grid.
For Leclerc, that was where the more uncomfortable questions should be directed.
"I feel like we are losing the results we want on the Sunday because of a lack of performance on the Saturday. This is where we should focus," he said.
"We need to do a step on the Saturday, especially in Qualifying as we seem to be on the back foot compared to our competitors. Then in the race we are strong but not enough to overtake on track."
Vasseur sees a missed opportunity
In his assessment of the race, Vasseur did not view Leclerc's fourth place as evidence that the strategy had failed. Quite the opposite: he believed the race had demonstrated that Ferrari possessed enough pace to win if circumstances had broken its way.
“You see that you always have positives and negatives, it doesn't matter the weekend,” Vasseur said.
“The pace of Charles in the race was more than good – we did a stint of 49 laps I think with the hard and the pace was still there.
“All the teams did the same with one car on softs or mediums and another one on hards to cover all the options. He was leading the group of [drivers on] hards and I think with a second incident, a red flag, it was the win.
“A Safety Car, it would have been P2, P3. It's more a strategy than something else and on his side, the pace was good.
“It's the only thing that we can do on Sunday. If we missed something, it's more yesterday [in Qualifying]. Today I think we did what we had to do – we took the risks we had to take and the pace is the pace that we need to have.”
There was, admittedly, a sizeable gap between ‘could have won’ and actually winning. Ferrari needed an incident, a Safety Car or a red flag to turn its strategy into something more substantial, while Antonelli's Mercedes ultimately controlled the race.
Read also:
Hamilton's titles hopes are over: ‘There’s no stopping Mercedes'But Vasseur's conclusion was revealing. Ferrari's problem, in his view, was not that it had mismanaged Sunday. It was that the team had not put itself in a strong enough position on Saturday, as Leclerc also said.
The latter’s race had offered Ferrari something it has occasionally struggled to produce this season: evidence that its SF-26 can be highly competitive over a full stint.
Ferrari found the pace at the Madring. It found the strategy. It even found the nerve to gamble. What it didn't find was the Safety Car it needed to make the gamble pay.
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