Hey Tifose! Welcome back to the rollercoaster that is the life of a Ferrari Fan.
So before diving into this week's race, I’d like to make a parenthesis.
This was not a great week…I mean, can you blame me? Hello? Have you not seen the news?
You may wonder: Which of the many news Beatrice? Yeah, I totally feel you.
This week for us Tifosi was like being inside an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
Sooo many dramas inside the Scuderia, people leaving or leaked of news of people that might be leaving, confirming, denying, Charles Leclerc's future after the contract ends, Lewis Hamilton in Ferrari. LEWIS HAMILTON IN FERRARIIII?????
Anyway, while we (or at least me) was impatiently waiting for Wallpaper Wednesday, Formula 1 decided to bring me back to reality by announcing a 10-grid penalty for Charles Leclerc - since Ferrari decided to change the Power Unit for car number 16.
We were heading to Free Practices and Quali with the weight of a 10-grid penalty.
Free Practice was not nice, we weren’t performing as expected but we shouldn’t be worried because our amazing new Team Principal was there reassuring us that we were still testing some “worst case” scenarios.
But you know, as my per usual, I was still panicking (can you blame me ah? Don’t think so).
So, we entered FP1 with two different cars, car 16 testing the new rear wing while car 55 with the old setting. Still testing right?
The tyre situation was the following: Ferrari, Mercedes and Haas with hard tyres, Redbull and Aston Martin with softs and the rest of the teams opted for medium tyres.
Marc Gene, Sky Sport and Ferrari employee said that here in Jeddah (unlike in Bahrain), all three sets of tyres should have more grip on the racetrack.
Anyway, I don’t want to bother you again with all the stress that came out from all the Free Practices but apparently, Ferrari decided to run under low power and that’s why we weren’t performing as well during the various sessions, apparently, we were working more on the long run tests than for quali, since we were confident of our speed for quali but not on our race pace for the upcoming Grand Prix.
(Bonus side of these Free Practices: it seemed that we improved our tyre management degradation on soft tyres).
THANK YOU FERRARI FOR THE EXTRA UNNECESSARY STRESS
And then it was Quali-time…
A lot happened, FIA deleted the time for Logan Sargeant (who was first lmao - poor guy). Lando Norris slightly touched the wall and did not make it through Q1 (McLaren I recommend a trip to Lourdes for Landinho). Piastri, I don’t know how but he made it to Q3. Charles and Carlos also made it to Q3 with Charles giving all his talent to end with the car at P2, but the best moment was at 8:41 minutes during Q2 when Verstappen's car started having issues in the gearbox.
I couldn’t believe it! Was the Bahrain curse real? I wanted to scream and cry at the same time as Queen Taylor would say.
In the end, we weren’t able to separate Lerstappen from one another with Charles starting P12 and Max P15.
And then it’s lights out and away we go…
We can say that this race started and ended with a penalty for Alonso, since he didn’t position in the right way the car at the starting grid.
At lap 18/50 there was a safety car, after Lance Stroll - who had an issue with his car, stopped just outside the track, in front of the emergency entrance/exit for the tow truck.
Of course, since Ferrari is soooo lucky, we had just pitted so we lost the advantage of doing the pit stop under Safety Car.
Don’t even get me started about the comms between Charles & Xavi, his engineer… I really don’t know the patience Leclerc has.. if it was me I probably would have burned the house down.
Charles lost his position to Sir Lewis Hamilton, who is now stuck between the 2 Ferrari Boys. Unfortunately during lap 22/50 Sainz was not able to defend his position against the Mercedes number 44. During Lap 25/50 the Ferrari team radio informed Carlos Sainz that Charles (who was still behind his team mate) was actually going faster than him, but there was no order to let him through by the comms. Carlos easily said that unless Charles was under the DRS distance, he would not brake to let him take the position. Spoiler: Charles wasn’t able to go under the DRS time, so yeah, it was nice to see how slow we were, really nice. At this time, Verstappen had gone from 15th to 2nd, but also the RedBull pit wall had to deal with some drama amongst drivers and their winning attitude. Both drivers want to fight for the championship and they spitted blood for the fastest lap. The race ended with Perez noted as "the King of the Streets", Max Verstappen as the Driver of the Day and El Plan seeing his third place taken by George Russell (due to serving the penalty wrong). And since FIA never contradicts itself, after taking away the victory to Nando Alonso and giving it to George Russell, they changed their mind again... (after proof was given by Aston Martin about serving the penalty correctly) and gave back (in the middle of the night) the trophy to Alonso, marking his 100th victory in Formula 1. Congrats to El Plan. Anyway, Jeddah was tough, not like Bahrain but still hard to watch. As a Ferrari fan I now realise that we are no longer the second team in the championship, not even the third …realising that we are now the fourth team really sucks… I hope that better days will come. Forza Ferrari, sempre 🐎❤️
See you next time Tifose! ❤️ -Beatrice 🌸
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