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Beyond the sanitary measures adopted by the Formula 1 World Championship and the movement of drivers for the coming season, almost all the attention is focused on Ferrari, where the competitiveness of Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc has multiplied the friction that has already occurred. They hinted last season when they were dissatisfied with some team orders. The last incident starred him at the Styrian Grand Prix, in Austria, this past weekend. A touch between the two in a curve ruined the career of the Italian team and left them out of the race at the first exchange. From the rest of the boxes they are stunned by the indiscipline of both pilots in what they consider to be a misunderstood ambition and they assure that they would not accept it in their team.
It is not the first or the last time that the rivalry overflows in the same box, especially in Ferrari. Legendary are the piques between Gilles Villeneuve and Didier Pironi in 1982 or Vettel and Mark Webber in 2013, although other teams have also suffered from the voracity of their drivers, such as Williams with Reuteman and Alan Jones in 1981, in Renault with Alain Prost and Rene Arnoux in 1982, in Red Bull with Ricciardo and Verstappen two years ago or in McLaren with Prost and Ayrton Senna in 1989 or with Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton in 2007. Precisely, the British team is not willing to see the same thing happen again. Now that he has two top-level drivers, like Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris.
“The pilots are very competitive. They have to be, and clearly they have a very big ego. They need it to get far. But as soon as a driver’s ego hinders the interests of the team, I would take it personally, “threatens McLaren team boss Andreas Seidl, who does not want to imagine that the same thing could happen to them as to Ferrari. «We allow them to compete freely“And we do not interfere as a team, as long as there is no clear reason to change positions due to different strategies or due to the different performance of their cars,” he says.
Anyway, at McLaren they are confident about the good relationship that the Madrid and the British have, something that is very evident on social networks. The same does not happen in the Cavallino Rampante box. Former driver Eddie Irvine, who raced for Maranello in the 1990s, believes that “Ferrari should have paid Vettel not to race this year,” after “Scuderia” chose not to renew him and confirm the signing. Carlos Sainz for next season. This snub and that the four-time champion is second on the team behind Leclerc make him dangerous, unpredictable and “destructive,” according to Irvine. By the way, Vettel yesterday maintained the uncertainty about his possible signing for Racig Point for next year.
The Grand Circus has already moved to Hungary, where the third Grand Prix of the season is held this weekend. The free ones this Friday showed two different scenarios in which only Valtteri Bottas stood out throughout the day, both dry and wet. The first round at the Hungaroring confirmed that Mercedes remains untreatable with Hamilton and Bottas in the lead. Racing Point’s pink clones followed closely as Renault and Ferrari improved compared to previous Grand Prix. It cost more to Red Bull and McLaren. However, there were variations in the second round, in which the rain appeared. Vettel, Bottas and Sainz were the best, something that relieved McLaren’s box, since a past Grand Prix is expected, both in qualifying and in the race.
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