Sebastian Vettel was far from happy with Ferrari’s tactics as team-mate Charles Leclerc took pole for the Italian Grand Prix in Monza on Saturday.
Leclerc secured a second straight pole position in qualifying to boost Ferrari hopes of winning their home race for the first time since 2010.
Leclerc, who claimed his first F1 victory last week at the Belgian GP, topped the timesheets by 0.039 of a second over championship leader Lewis Hamilton.
Hamilton’s Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas was another eight thousandths of a second down in third place, with four-time world champion Vettel in fourth.
Qualifying ended in near-farcical fashion as the front-runners ran out of time in Q3 as they waited for a slipstream, with ‘tow’ playing a crucial role at the high-speed Monza track.
Vettel said: “I thought we had spoken about it but… yeah… I definitely listened to what we intended to do. I think it was clear what will (i.e. would) happen in the last bit of qualifying.
“I think we were foreseeing exactly what happened, but we weren’t doing what we were supposed to do, and that’s why it was a mess and we didn’t get, you know… I didn’t get around in the end.”
