Zak Brown and Christian Horner were recently seen taking a selfie together on their flight home after the Singapore Grand Prix and both seemed happy about restoring peace in Formula 1. However, former Haas team boss Guenther Steiner is of the opinion that Brown should be trying to please Fred Vasseur more than Horner.
Steiner said so because he feels like Ferrari will be the team that will decide this year’s championship, at least on the driver’s side because they are good enough to take points away from Red Bull and Max Verstappen. McLaren are in desperate need of such help if they are to prevent the Dutchman from claiming his fourth consecutive title.
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“I think Ferrari will decide who is going to be the world champion — the driver’s world champion,” Steiner said on ‘The Red Flags Podcast’. He then further added,
“It is about how many points they can steal from Max, so Zak [Brown] needs to be nice with Fred [Vasseur] and not with Christian [Horner]. Fred helps him to steal points from Red Bull.”
After Lando Norris failed to finish on the podium in Baku, McLaren needed him to outscore Verstappen by a significant margin in Singapore. However, he only managed to outscore Verstappen by eight points at the Marina Bay Street Circuit after the Red Bull driver finished in second and minimized the damage.
Mercedes is also failing to stop Verstappen’s march to the championship
With Lewis Hamilton starting the race just behind Verstappen in P3, there was a slight chance that his Silver Arrow could have overtaken the 26-year-old at the start. However, Hamilton was left disappointed with a poor strategy from Mercedes which led to him finishing the race in P6, 85 seconds behind race winner Norris.
Hamilton was one of only two cars that started the race on the Soft tires. However, he later pointed out that it wasn’t his choice to go on the Softs. He explained that he tried hard to convince the team to start the race on Mediums but they refused his request.
: Mercedes admitted they made a “clear mistake” by starting Lewis Hamilton on soft tires during the Singapore GP, a decision that left Hamilton “angry.” The team hoped for an early advantage off the line but misjudged tire degradation, ruining his race. James Allison… pic.twitter.com/FmNQmaDdFq
— F1 Naija (@f1_naija) September 25, 2024
“I battled as hard as I could to fight to go on the medium tire but the team continued to suggest that I start on the soft and when they took the blankets off, everyone was on mediums,” Hamilton said post-race. Even George Russell admitted that once he saw Hamilton with the Soft tire, he knew his teammate wouldn’t be happy.
