Ferrari under the media spotlight after Lewis Hamilton’s ‘crazy’ moment

Italian journalist Leo Turrini says Fred Vasseur has some questions to ask and “perhaps give some answers” after Ferrari failed to take points off the crashing Mercedes team-mates in Qatar.

Ferrari were gifted an open goal by Mercedes at the Lusail circuit when Lewis Hamilton and George Russell collided at the very first corner.

Declaring that Hamilton had gone “crazy”, but unable to resist a dig that it “must have been Masi’s fault”, the Briton’s race was over with his W14 one wheel short in the gravel.

‘Qatar was not good for Ferrari’

As for Russell, he had to pit for a new nose and fresh tyres having suffered damage to the car as well as a puncture. That dropped him all the way to the back of the field.

But despite his early-race drama, the Mercedes driver came through to pass Charles Leclerc and beat the Ferrari driver to fourth place.

Turrini wasn’t impressed, even more so given Leclerc was the only one of the Scuderia team-mates to take the start with Carlos Sainz out with a fuel leak.

“Qatar was not good for Ferrari,” Turrini wrote on his blog.

“It had already been embarrassing to discover that Sainz couldn’t even take part in the race due to a question of reliability (something had broken on the car, fuel area).

“But when Hamilton at the start (and in short, it must have been Masi’s fault) went crazy, throwing himself at his team-mate Russell, well, I naively hoped that the Cavallino could gain a few points on Mercedes.

“Having been the last one as he was, Russell calmly went to pick up Leclerc. Demonstrating how Ferrari’s journey into the desert is far from the Promised Land.”

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Missing out on the opportunity to close the gap to Mercedes, Ferrari’s deficit of 20 points grew to 28 in Qatar.

“In short and without the sake of controversy: Fred Vasseur must ask himself some questions and perhaps give some answers,” concluded Turrini.

The Italian is not the only pundit to question Ferrari’s lacklustre performance in Qatar with former team boss Eddie Jordan telling TalkSPORT: “We saw a little spark from Ferrari, we saw them win that race in Singapore, and then we saw a couple of little pole positions.

“But where was it this weekend? Where was it? It’s gone, it vanished into thin air.”

Former Ferrari team manager Peter Windsor called it a “very disappointing” result for Leclerc “to get blown away by George after the incidents he had.

“Fair enough they got beaten by McLaren, but he shouldn’t have got beaten by George. Not a good day for Ferrari at all.”

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