Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz qualified fourth and fifth, but in Sunday’s race, they tumbled down to ninth and 10th, not helped by the fact that both stopped before a safety car intervention that gave rivals a helping hand in the form of cheap stops.
However, Vasseur says that the other key issue was that the team didn’t get enough information on tyre degradation on Friday when Charles Leclerc lost the whole of FP2 to a mechanical issue.
As a result, the engineers overestimated the impact of degradation with the new Pirelli construction, which was introduced at Silverstone.
The team suffered badly from degradation earlier in the season, and it's one of the characteristics of the car that it has been working hard to address.
"Starting from P4, P5 we had the feeling after the quali that we could have done a much better job than this,” said Vasseur when asked by Autosport for his verdict on the race. “We can't be happy finishing P9, P10.
“But now we need to have a deep look at the weekend, not just at the race. I think we didn't do the long stint on Friday, only the soft compound, and Charles was struck in the garage. And we were a bit scared with the deg.
“Probably somewhere in our mind we had the first races of the season, where today [Sunday] we were far too conservative on the tyre management, and we didn't push enough.
“Then we were a bit unlucky with the safety car. This is not in our hands, and we don't have to think about this, we have to think about what we can manage. And honestly, I think that we could have pushed much more."
Source: Autosport