Sebastian Vettel: The German driver and his engineer had a heated exchange on radio, something which Ralf Schumacher blames on Ferrari.
Former F1 driver Ralf Schumacher has weighed in on the much-talked about miscommunication between Sebastian Vettel and his Ferrari race engineer. Vettel was unimpressed with the communication by the Italian Riccardo Adami, even going on to utter “fuck’s sake” in the process. Schumacher has put the blame squarely on the Ferrari team management. He finds it untenable that a “team fighting for the championship” is creating such problems. It’s another matter that Ferrari are far from being a race winner, let alone fight for the championship this season.
“He (Adami) didn’t understand at all what Sebastian wanted, not even in the end. Either because he speaks little English or because Seb should have learned Italian.”
“Sorry, Ferrari, that’s not possible. A team fighting for the championship that can’t even communicate well.”
Vettel plays down the controversy
Sebastian Vettel, on his part, called it much ado about nothing, and that it is normal to ‘communicate’ like that during races. He also underlined the fact that ultimately the strategy did pay off, and he got the value points. Truth be told, Vettel is right, considering the oft-heated exchanges of Max Verstappen, who otherwise are extremely close to each other. Vettel had this to say on the excerpt of the radio communication that was broadcast live.
“It’s normal that you communicate. I think it’s very weird for you to judge because you don’t get all the… I don’t know, whoever is selecting which radio transmissions to broadcast and which not, I think it’s very difficult there for you to know what is being said and get the full picture. But I think it was nothing outstanding. Obviously, it’s a lot of managing tyres here and as I said at the end we took the decision and we stick to it.”
The Vettel-Ferrari radio transcript (via racefans.net)
| To Vettel | What do you think about going to the end with these tyres? |
| Vettel | Oh for fuck’s sake. I asked you this before. Now I’ve been pushing for three laps. |
| To Vettel | Yeah I understand, we are just checking. |
| Vettel | It depends, yeah. It depends. How many laps to go? |
| To Vettel | 16 laps and we think to be five laps short. |
| Vettel | What’s the pace of the other people that stopped? |
| To Vettel | 22.6 |
| Vettel | OK here’s the task for you. 22.6 to the end and then what do I have to do to stay ahead? |
| To Vettel | I’ll come back to you. |
| To Vettel | A 23.4, 23.5 to the end. |
| Vettel | I can do, I can do that. We can try, we’ve got nothing to lose. |
| To Vettel | We are P5. That’s what I was asking for. |
