Eddie Jordan tears into ‘shambolic’ Ferrari with latest ‘screw up’ analysed

Despite being praised earlier this year for overcoming their strategy and pit stop bungles, Ferrari “screwed up” in Las Vegas says Eddie Jordan.

But according to his former technical director Gary Anderson, that’s just Ferrari “being the red Ferrari” that seems to “attract this little bit of confusion “.

Ferrari returned to the days of old in Las Vegas

Ferrari had, in team boss Fred Vasseur’s words, a moment of “chaos” in the Saturday night race in conditions that were “really difficult for everybody”.

Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz suffered severe tyre degradation that forced them into early pit stops with Sainz later urging Ferrari to let him pit as he second set of tyres went off the boil.

Ordered on lap 26 to let Leclerc pass as the eight-time Grand Prix winner had the better pace, Sainz told his race engineer that he wanted to pit and repeated that several times before being told to box.

But as he reached the line marking the entrance to the pit lane, he was told to stay out as his mechanics were “not ready” for him. A frustrated Sainz yelled: “Wake up guys! Come on!”

The Spaniard bounced back to finish the Grand Prix in third place, seemingly ignoring team orders in the process to overtake Leclerc for position on a night when Ferrari did not cover themselves in glory.

For Jordan, hosting the Formula for Success podcast with Anderson as his guest, it was a stark reminder of Ferrari’s past strategy and pit stop blunders.

“We’ve seen right from our day – I think Luca Montezemolo was about the only one who could control the team – but consistently, Ferrari have screwed up, haven’t they?” said the former F1 team boss.

“They screw up with the wrong tyres, they screw up with this. I mean, it’s just shambolic from time to time, and we think it’s going to improve.

“We know that Fred Vasseur is a good man, but in your lifetime, I’d like to ask you this, on the perch on the pit wall when a driver says to you, irrespective of who the driver is, ‘I need to pit, I need tyres’. And they say it once, and there’s no response, and then they say the second time, and then the third time, the fourth time they say ‘box, box’.

“The guy’s in the pit lane. He’s in the pit lane, Gary, he’s over the white f**king line. And they say, ‘stay out, we’re not ready for you’. I mean, what kind of crap is that?”

Anderson said it was just Ferrari being Ferrari.

“Well, let’s go back a few years, and [Eddie] Irvine was driving for them and was knocking on the door of a World Championship. He arrived in the pits for a wheel change, and they only had three wheels there,” he said.

“So, you know, it’s been happening through many management structures, it’s just being the red Ferrari, to be honest. It’s one of those sort of situations where it seems to attract this little bit of confusion in the pit.”

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However, the former technical director also defended Ferrari’s strategists as they had a better read on the race situation than the driver, despite how Sainz may have felt on that set of hard tyres.

“But at end of day,” Anderson continued, “I have to agree a little bit with the team against Carlos Sainz call for the tyres because Carlos Sainz can only see and feel what he’s driving. He doesn’t really have a good impression of the other 19 cars are out there.

“And you might feel the tyres are dead, but everybody else is maybe even more dead, and all you can do with that is to see the lap times of other people, and that’s what the team should be looking at. The team should be alive to see what’s going on with everybody else, because that’s their opportunity.

“So when he’s chatting about tyres being finished, yes, that’s all okay. We’ve heard Lewis do that many, many times, but you don’t want to necessarily just react to that. You want to have a chat with him about that and explain to him the situation about the other cars, what they’re doing and what you were seeing.

“Obviously a bit of a surprise in Vegas, because the slippery track and the conditions meant that the tyres were greening a lot quicker than they expected to, and also, Ferrari were always in competition with somebody else, so they were driving in turbulent air. So they were probably harder on the tyres and a lot of other cars.

“But at the end of the day, it’s just one of those sort of situations, you need to have a conversation with the driver and calm him down, explain everything to him. And then if you have to make a decision, you make a decision to pit but then you make sure your team’s got the tyres. That’s a different problem altogether.”

Eddie Jordan ‘quite shocked’ by Charles Leclerc’s X-rated rant

As for the other side of the Ferrari garage, Jordan was “quite shocked” by Leclerc’s sweary rant as he reckons he’s “just a nice, nice boy”. “I never thought I would ever hear that kind of stuff,” he added.

Anderson replied: “It’s just one of those things. In the heat of the moment, people say stuff. We’ve all done that in the heat of the moment.

“But it’s one of these sort of situations he’s got there at Ferrari, I think, where Sainz is the leaving end of this year, there’s always an intra-team battle, and it seems to me they’re always having a bit of a go at each other.

“The car is at the level where both of them are doing a reasonable job in it. They’re always going to be battles. The same as we see with McLaren but McLaren are handling it slightly different.

“For Leclerc it just sort of boiled over a bit, to be honest, this weekend. Don’t understand it all, because I didn’t see anything that far wrong with it. You know, at the beginning of the race it was a case of they were battling to try and get past Russell, both of them, and they were both destroying their tyres as they were trying to do it.

“The one thing about this formula right now is, if you’re going to pass somebody, you need to arrive and drive. You need to arrive and pass them because if you spend one lap behind somebody, you’re going to destroy your tyes. They’re going to start overheating, start overheating, you’re losing performance. We saw that the beginning of this race.

“So I think it was all that boiled up in Leclerc’s mind. He just couldn’t quite get the job done, to be honest. You know, all it all boiled up, and they just let it out to the end of the race.”

Read next: Fred Vasseur tipped to deliver stern message to ‘p*ssed off’ Leclerc