Spa-Francorchamps, Belgium - Lewis Hamilton’s total mastery of the Belgian Grand Prix was threatening to send us dozing off when the right rear tyre of Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari went pop at 320km/h.
He somehow kept the car on the track, but the third-place finish that waited just a lap-and-a-half hence suddenly went the same way as a million threads of his exploding rubber.
Vettel usually has the air of a gap-year student without a care under the sky, but he was furious. He sought out Paul Hembery, director of motorsport at Pirelli, the tyre manufacturers. The conversation was short and heated.
"You told us the tyres could do 40 laps," screamed the German. Hembery contests that accusation, as we shall see.
Vettel then let rip in front of any notebook or microphone in the vicinity, suggesting that had his tyre blown moments before at Eau Rouge, the steep climbing corner that is taken foot to the floor, he may not have been long for this world.
“If this had happened earlier then I’m ******,” he said. “I was almost stuck in with the spectators. It’s unacceptable.”
Vettel, along with Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, raised questions about tyre safety at the pre-race drivers’ briefing.
These three are real racers. They are not fainthearts. They were prompted by Nico Rosberg suffering a blowout in practice on Friday. That was the right rear, too. It was only fractionally further on from Vettel’s puncture on the Kemmel Straight.
‘OUT OF THE BLUE’
Pirelli investigated Rosberg’s problem, reporting that the tyre appeared to be structurally sound and that an external force - such as debris - had penetrated the rubber. Rosberg was less than impressed, calling it “a theory with no real evidence”.
Vettel agreed. “It’s bull****,” he said. “If Nico tells us he didn’t go off the track, he didn’t go off the track. Same with me. Out of the blue the tyre explodes.”
Vettel soon fled the circuit, his spokesman claiming he had a helicopter to catch before the weather turned.
He left behind a febrile paddock. TV cameras crowded around Hembery, six or seven deep, on the lower of the two levels of a paddock built in the Ardennes forest. Hembery was irritated by the accusations that Pirelli were to blame for Ferrari’s plan to stop once. No other team did fewer than two stops.
He also pointed out that since the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in 2013, when blowouts were occurring left, right and centre, his company had produced 70 000 race-worthy tyres.
“We have never told the teams how many laps they should be allowed to do on tyres because they do not want us to,” said Hembery. “When we said the mediums would be good for 40 laps, it was not a guarantee; it was a mean average and that could vary from driver to driver and car to car.
“Nobody told me that Ferrari was going one stop and if they had said that, we would have sat down with them to discuss it. You have to ask why the fastest team here - Mercedes - should be convinced they would need two stops and even considered three. And this is one of the toughest and longest tracks in Formula One, don’t forget.”
‘RISKY STRATEGY’
The nub of it is that Ferrari took a gamble. They lacked competitiveness and devised a clever strategy to get round the fact, one that Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff called “risky”. Ferrari was one-and-a-half laps from looking like a genius team, as Hembery noted wryly. And had they pulled it off, they would not have given the lion’s share of credit to Pirelli.
Focus turned to Ferrari and the reaction of the well-smoked face of team principal Maurizio Arrivabene, a former Marlboro executive who has shown himself a cool customer since taking over the team.
“We got our strategy absolutely right,” he said. “Our strategy, even if it is aggressive, is based on clear data. We are not so crazy as to take a risk with our driver. So don’t worry, we did our job.
“We have an engineer from Pirelli (Mario Isola) - what do you think he is for? He’s not there to chew gum but to follow every run. We had zero warning. I can show you the paper. One stop was our Plan A. We decided that at 11 o’clock this morning, precisely.”
Listening in at the back of the Ferrari motorhome was Pirelli’s media chap, Roberto Boccafogli. He asked a German journalist how he would report the row. Boccafogli then scurried off, intelligence to report back to Hembery so he might be forewarned when his bosses in Italy ask him what on earth happened here on lap 43.
Daily Mail