Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivabene doesn’t want to get in a fight with tyre supplier Pirelli, despite a tyre failure costing Sebastian Vettel a podium finish.
Vettel heavily criticised Pirelli after the Belgian Grand Prix, leading to the Italian supplier to accuse Ferrari of a “risky” strategy which led to the tyres passing their ‘wear life’.
Arrivabene insists there is no point getting into a war of words with Pirelli.
“I don’t want to start with this back and forth, ‘Maurizio said about Pirelli, Pirelli said about Ferrari’ et cetera.
“I understand the reason, as you understand, why Sebastian was disappointed, but that’s it. I don’t want to open any kind of fight, because it’s not the case.”
Meanwhile, he revealed that Pirelli’s engineer never gave any prior warning that a one-stop strategy could lead to a tyre failure.
“It was our strategy, Plan A, main plan, before the race,” added Arrivabene.
“Normally when you do the strategy during the strategy meeting, it’s based on data that you have.
“We have an engineer; all the teams have an engineer from Pirelli.
“What do you think that engineer is doing? He’s not there to eat chewing gum. He’s there to check the tyres, to follow all the runs that you’re doing and give the data to the team.”
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