Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne says his Formula 1 team “screwed up” at the Italian Grand Prix after seeing Mercedes cruise to a dominant 1-2 finish.
Just one week after Sebastian Vettel pushed Lewis Hamilton hard for victory in Belgium, Ferrari had no answer to the pace of its main championship rival.
Vettel finished 36 seconds behind Hamilton to leave Ferrari chasing answers about what had gone wrong.
But rather than accept that the result was damage limitation – with Vettel only losing 10 points to Hamilton on a weekend when the gap could have been much bigger – Marchionne said the team had to take full responsibility for not having built on its Spa performance.
“I think we just screwed up,” Marchionne told German broadcaster RTL.
“The setup for the car was wrong. I think we underestimated the circuit.
“We screwed up from Belgium, from Spa, into here. Now, we need to go back to the factory and find out which way the car went sideways. But we will be back in Singapore.”
Ferrari will return to its Maranello factory this week to try to understand why both Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen struggled to get comfortable with the car over the Monza weekend – especially under braking.
Matters were also not helped by it being unable to try improvements on Saturday morning when, after a difficult opening day, the final free practice session was hit by rain.
Speaking about the weekend, Raikkonen said: “We lacked speed unfortunately and then the balance maybe wasn’t correct.
“We changed [the setup] after Friday and obviously in the race was the first time we tried.
“But with the [right] setup, it was not going to be awfully different.
“So it’s something we have to fix in this kind of circuit with the low downforce.”
Vettel’s pace later in the race was also affected by him driving more cautiously in light of a power steering issue that had resulted in him running down the escape road on lap 40.