Ferrari DSQ for underweight F1 car in China branded as “inexcusable”

Renowned Formula 1 journalist Peter Windsor says Ferrari can have no excuse for Charles Leclerc being disqualified from the Chinese GP for running an underweight car.

Ferrari endured a tough day in Shanghai on Sunday, with Leclerc finishing fifth on the road and teammate Lewis Hamilton crossing the line in sixth a day after scoring victory in the sprint race.

However, drama struck the team just hours after the finish, with Leclerc being thrown out from the race for racing a car that was 1kg below the 800kg minimum weight requirement and Hamilton suffering the same fate for excessive plank wear.

In a statement, Ferrari blamed “very high tyre wear” for Leclerc’s exclusion, with the Monegasque having switched to a one-stop strategy to run longer on the hard compound.

However, Windsor dismissed the reasoning provided by Ferrari and stated that the double DNF should act as a wake-up call for the team.

“Underweight is absolutely inexcusable in my book. There is no excuse [for it],” he said on his YouTube channel.

“I can't believe that they put out a statement that because he ran a one-stop strategy and the hard tyre was worn away more than he thought. I mean give me a break.

“Obviously in F1 it's not only Ferrari, we saw it in the Belgian GP last year [George Russell being disqualified for the same reason].

“Even though Mercedes have made the same mistake, many teams made the mistake, we did at Williams [when I was its team manager].

“It happens because you are always on the limit and you are always looking for some sort of advantage so you do cut corners periodically.

“But these days with the number of people they have got, the technology they have got, there is no excuse for it. It's a wake-up call.

“Okay, you can say the new Pirellis have a different wear rate in terms of the speed at which they go off and the weight they carry, but if that's the case you build in a margin. That sort of information is not impossible to get from Pirelli.”

Windsor believes Ferrari, like most other F1 teams, employs far too many managers and lacks an autocratic leader like Adrian Newey to make key decisions.

This, he thinks, was the root cause of Ferrari failing post-race scrutineering checks.

“I believe in the total opposite of micromanagement and I think the problem not only with Ferrari but with all F1 teams today - maybe not Haas - is micromanagement.

“There are too many people with titles taking some sort of responsibility and this is when not having a superstar technical director in charge of the team saying yes or no is a problem.

“I said over the winter that it was quite a good call by Freddie Vasseur to back away from Adrian [Newey]. And it was interesting that Freddie said he was going to take some of the technical responsibility himself.

“Well, I'm sorry, Freddie, the buck stops absolutely with you on this one because not only you are the team principal, but you do have a technical influence.

“Those things are in your control. They are things before you actually hit the ball, before you get in the race car certain parameters are in your total control, get them right - there is no excuse not to.

"If Adrian was at Ferrari, I wonder if that would have happened actually because he has got an autocratic way of running things, going back to the old Patrick Head days, and I'm a firm believer in that.

“Micromanagement is an absolute insidious drama of F1, they need to get away from it.”