Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur rebuffed claims of breaching safety after Fernando Alonso took aim at Lewis Hamilton amid his late brake issue in Formula 1‘s Singapore Grand Prix.
Hamilton had been chasing down Andrea Kimi Antonelli for fifth place late on at the Marina Bay Street Circuit when the problem took hold.
Braking into Turn 16, sparks flew from the left-front wheel of the Ferrari, sending him off track and nullifying his challenge.
As the problem worsened, Hamilton let team-mate Charles Leclerc – who had released him to attack the Italian – back through, and was soon forced to nurse the SF-25 to the finish.
Hamilton had a buffer of around half a minute over Alonso’s Aston Martin, but with his brakes now virtually nonexistent, he had to coast around the final few laps, exploiting track limits.
This enraged Alonso, who finished just four tenths off Hamilton, leading him to launch a foul-mouthed rant over the radio.
“I cannot f***ing believe it. Is it safe to drive with no brakes?” he said.
Hamilton’s use of the extremities saw him incur the wrath of the stewards, who handed him a five-second time penalty for the misdemeanour, promoting Alonso to seventh.
The lift and coast issue that thwarted Ferrari in Singapore
After the race, Vasseur explained that Hamilton had been forced to manage the issue for the whole race, leading to a common Ferrari trait of 2025: lifting and coasting.
“Yeah, that we were overheating, not from Lap 1, but from Lap 2 or 3,” he revealed to media including Motorsport Week. “We had to do a lift and coast of the race.
“Even for them, at the end, it’s not easy to drive, because you have to adapt your braking point each lap.
“Clearly, when we pushed a couple of laps with Lewis, I think the pace was decent. But you can’t do 95% of the race on the back foot and doing management.”
Asked if the situation was breaching the limits of acceptable safety standards, Vasseur was quick to quell any notion that Ferrari was putting others at risk.
“In terms of safety, yes, because we adapted the pace,” he explained.
“It’s not that Lewis was pushing like hell in the last lap, but he was 30 seconds slower. In terms of safety, it was on the safe side.”
“It’s not the target,” Vasseur added, before laughing: “The target is to be safe, but the target is not to be 30 seconds slower.”
READ MORE – Lewis Hamilton details ruinous F1 Singapore GP brake issue
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