Ferrari Formula 1 boss Fred Vasseur insists that the Sao Paulo GP was “not a dramatic weekend” for the Italian team despite a poor overall result.

Following two superb performances in Austin and Mexico City Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz finished fourth and fifth in the Saturday sprint, and then both really struggled in Sunday’s rain. 

Leclerc eventually claimed fifth, while Sainz crashed in both qualifying and the race.

Overall the team lost seven points relative to leaders McLaren in the constructors’ championship, and 12 to Red Bull, and it remains in second place.

Leclerc pitted early for new tyres, just before the VSC and subsequent red flag turned the race on its head, but the call didn’t pay off.

“It was a difficult Sunday, but I think overall it’s not a dramatic weekend,” said Vasseur when asked for his verdict by this writer.

“It’s more on some choices. It was quite difficult to anticipate the pit stop. And for sure, you can say at the end of the day if you stay on track and you are waiting for the red flag it’s the right call, but if you crash, you look stupid.

“Honestly, this kind of weekend is quite difficult and difficult to manage from the pit wall and from the car. It’s more the pace today and the setup, that it’s perhaps problematic.

“Probably we were six or seven tenths slower than Norris at the beginning of the stint, and probably six or seven tenths faster than him at the end of the stint!”

He acknowledged that Leclerc’s early stop in Brazil unexpectedly put him into traffic.

“We underestimated I think the loss in the pit exit,” he said. “It was very, very slippery, and he lost a couple of tenths. It was enough to lose the position.

“If you look at the race, I’m not sure that it’s a game changer, because at the end, we would have pit the lap after with the VSC or whatever, that it mean that there was not a game changer. The game changer on the strategy would have been to stay on track, and to bet for the red flag.”

Regarding Sainz’s costly accidents he said: “I’m not worried about this. I think he will be back in Vegas very strong.

“Last year, Vegas was a good example. He started on the wrong side of the weekend last year with that drain cover. And he had a very good recovery over the weekend. We have three weeks to do a full reset, and he will be back strong in Vegas.”

Regarding the constructors’ championship situation he added: “We knew that probably the track will be difficult, probably much more for McLaren, and at the end of the day on the weekend, we didn’t lose so many points.

“Okay, I don’t want to lose some points, I want to make points. It means that we have to have a better weekend than this weekend. But it’s not a drama, and we’ll have probably a much better weekend next race in Vegas, and it’s where we’ll have to score the big ones.”

He added: “We have the same approach for months now. We want to be focused race-by-race, because for me, it’s the best attitude, and just to be focused on what you can do, and not to try to think or to calculate, and we keep the same one for the next week.”