Hamilton is "frustrated, but not demotivated," claims Vasseur after Ferrari's tough race in Hungary
On the back of a disappointing weekend for Lewis Hamilton in Hungary, Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur insists that the seven-time world champion is "frustrated, but not demotivated."
Ferrari endured mixed emotions in Saturday’s qualifying at the Hungaroring. Lewis Hamilton failed to secure anything better than a P12 on the grid after struggling for pace in constantly-changing weather conditions.
On the other side of the garage, Charles Leclerc also looked to uncomfortable behind the wheel of his SF-25, albeit he progressed into the final part of qualifying. With a storming lap, he grabbed pole position on a track where he never really felt himself competitive.
Come the race, the Monegasque had a great start to maintain the lead into Turn 1. During his first stint, he looked very competitive and was able to build up a margin from his closest rival Oscar Piastri.
Although he appeared to be strong during his second stint as well, his pace unexpectedly faded in the last segment of the Mogyoród race which saw him fall back to P4, ending a disappointing day at the Hungaroring.
His team-mate Hamilton started from the hard compound, but spent most of the race in traffic.
Although he looked strong even on used tyres in free air, he found himself in heavy traffic on his second set of tyres again, which meant that he was ended up down in P12, the position which he started the 70-lap race from.
After the disappointing qualifying result on Saturday which led to his difficult race at the Hungaroring on Sunday, Hamilton branded himself as "useless."
"Clearly a massively disappointing day and being on the wrong side of a tenth cost me. I’ve got a lot of work to do and will remain focused on that."
"Useless, absolutely useless. It clearly is. I drove terribly. It is what it is. The team has no problem, you've seen the car is on pole, so we probably need to change driver.”
His lowly starting position and the decision to start the race on the hards saw Hamilton fall back the order at the start and despite his promising pace in free air, the seven-time F1 champion spent the majority of the race stuck in heavy traffic.
Asked to comment on the situation, Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur insisted that the seven-time F1 champion has not lost his motivation, he is simply frustrated.
"I can perfectly understand the situation. Sometimes you are making comments on what the driver is saying [in] the car, but if you put the microphone on some other sportsmen in football and so on, I'm not sure that it would be much better.
"Sometimes, just after the race or just after qualifying, you are very disappointed, and the first reaction is harsh. I can understand the frustration, but we are all frustrated.
"I don't need to motivate him. Honestly, he's frustrated, but not demotivated. Yeah, he's demanding. But I think it's also why he's seven-times world champion.
"He's demanding with the team, with the car, with the engineers, with the mechanics, with myself as well. Sometimes, if you ask me [something], if I say [what I want] I will go to the stewards."
Vasseur stressed that the tight nature of the current pecking order means that the tiniest of margins can decide over several positions in qualifying, and that happened to Hamilton, who was only fractionally slower than Leclerc in Q2, but that was enough for the British champion to fail to progress any further.
"When you are a seven-time world champion, your team-mate is on pole position and you are out in Q2, it's a tough situation. But overall, we can also have a deep look that he was in front of Charles in Q1, with the first set that he was one tenth off in Q2.
"We were not far away from having the two cars out in Q2. And the outcome of this is that Charles at the end is able to do the pole position. The issue is that when we were lacking performance and at risk, he did one lap two tenths slower than Charles, and he was out in Q2.
"I don't know if we were unlucky with Lewis or lucky with Charles to go through, but at the end of the day, it's really on the edge. But I can understand the frustration from Lewis, that's normal, and he will come back. Then he was stuck in a DRS train, but when he was alone, the pace was good," concluded the Frenchman.
