Frederic Vasseur has joked he won't return until the Qatar Grand Prix following a coincidence in Ferrari's Formula 1 form. At Spa-Francorchamps for the Belgian Grand Prix, Charles Leclerc took pole position (once Max Verstappen was penalised) and earned a podium finish as Leclerc managed third behind Verstappen and Sergio Perez. It was just Ferrari's third podium of the season, with the other two also coming on Sprint weekends with third in Azerbaijan and second in Austria. With the next Sprint not until October's Qatar Grand Prix, Vasseur floated the idea of a longer summer break.
Vasseur in Qatar
"I'll come back in Qatar!," Vasseur joked to media including RacingNews365. "You can have different explanations for this, and the first could be that we have better preparation than some of our competitors [for Sprint weekends and reduced practice]. "It is also perhaps linked to the characteristic of the tracks because you have some similarities between Baku and Spa, but I'm not sure that it is the right conclusion that we are considering." On Sprint weekends, teams are locked into set-ups after just a single practice session ahead of Grand Prix Qualifying on Friday afternoon when parc ferme conditions are applied. But at Spa, teams were forced into a guessing game for set-ups owing to a wet practice before a dry Grand Prix, with Vasseur admitting that precautions were taken, including over the amount of fuel. "It was the same for everybody," he said. "You have to be on the conservative side, nobody wants to have to do lift and coast for 10 laps because you don't have enough fuel. "For sure, we have the numbers of last year, and sometimes you can trust a little bit what you did in the past, and we have the correlation from the beginning of the season compared to last year. "This is important and on the set-up, we are all on the conservative side knowing that it will be very difficult to manage to manage the weekened. "We can't wind back after FP1 and it means that we have to do two Qualifying sessions and races in the same configuration."
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