Lewis Hamilton showed his frustration with the tactics of his Ferrari team at the Miami Grand Prix on Sunday while the Scuderia was finding it difficult to compete. Hamilton has finished eighth with teammate Charles Leclerc seventh while Ferri remains with a single podium so far this season – third place from Leclerc to Djeddah. A shot Hamilton fired several barbed wire comments on the team’s radio after asking Leclerc to allow him to pass. The Briton had a spell in the race when he seemed to drive faster than Leclerc and clearly felt that he had a better chance of closing the field on Kimi Antonelli from Mercedes.
“I just burn my tires behind him. Do you want me to sit here all the race?” Hamilton asked.
When he was finally allowed to pass, three laps later, Hamilton replied: “It’s not a good team job, that’s all I will say … In China, I got out.”
He criticized the time it took the team to make his decisions saying: “Take a tea break while you are, go!”
When the seven times world champion was authorized to pass Leclerc, he could not progress and with the inverted roles and the driver of Monte Carlo in search more quickly behind him, the team changed his positions.
Hamilton was then informed that Carlos Sainz de Williams, the former Ferrari driver, was only 1.4 seconds behind him and replied “Do you want me to let him pass?”
After the race, Hamilton said he had to raise the problems.
“I wasted a lot of time behind Charles and at that time, I was thinking of making a concise decision and not wasting time. I am sure that people do not like certain subjects, but you must understand that it is frustrating, people say things very worse than I do not say, it was more sarcastic than other.
“I am not frustrated now but we will work internally and we will continue to push,” he said.
Frederic Vasseur, the director of the Ferrari team, defended the thought behind the movements and added “I can understand the frustration of the guys in the car, but in the end, he was well executed”.
Leclerc opted for diplomacy.
“This is a difficult situation, I think I will unfortunately opt for the boring answer and I will not comment too much here,” he said.
“It is obvious that today is not the way we want to manage a race, we will discuss internally to make better decisions,” said Leclerc. “There are no bad feelings for Lewis, absolutely not, it’s just as a team that we have to do better and today was proof. For the rest, I don’t want to talk more about details.”
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