Ferrari must fix ‘lift-and-coast’ problem admits Vasseur after Leclerc’s radio outburst

Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur admitted their pace management was excessive during the Singapore Grand Prix after Charles Leclerc complained on his radio about the amount of “lift-and-coast” he had to do.

Leclerc was repeatedly told to decelerate before reaching braking zones in order to prevent problems developing with his brakes. He was briefly allowed to stop the “lift-and-coast” at one point but was soon told to resume it.

Mercedes’ Andrea Kimi Antonelli passed Leclerc into turn 16 while he was managing his brakes. Leclerc snapped at race engineer Bryan Bozzi in frustration late in the race, claiming he was being told to do 200 metres of “lift-and-coast” per lap.

Vasseur admitted the team had been compromised by the need to protect their brakes in Singapore.

“In the race it was very, very difficult with cooling from the beginning,” he told the official Formula 1 channel. “When we had free air and we were pushing, I think the pace was decent. But we pushed 10% of the race at the end.

“We have to fix this because you can’t expect to be in free air all the race, [especially] in Singapore. I think it’s very frustrating: frustrating for the team, frustrating for drivers.”

Leclerc, who has faced similar “lift-and-coast” messages on many occasions this year, exclaimed “for fuck’s sake, we are doing 200 metres li-co,” at one stage during yesterday’s race. Vasseur said he could “perfectly understand” why his drivers were unhappy at being told to restrict their pace.

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“We are asking them to be on the back foot, not from lap two, but from lap three or four, and then you have still 58 laps to go. That means that it’s difficult.

“It’s difficult to manage for them in terms of driving, because to be at the limit when we are doing a lift-and-coast, it’s tricky.”

Ferrari’s pace was better during the brief periods they could run flat-out, he said. “You always try to improve from where you are. As everywhere, you have positives and negatives in the weekend.

“I think the pace was decent at the beginning. On some aspect it was very negative, like the lift-and-coast that we had to do, the management that we had to do. We lost too much lap time today like this. But let’s be focused on the next one.”

Leclerc’s radio messages about “lift-and-coast”

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