Vettel explains “you’ve messed up” F1 radio message

Sebastian Vettel has shed light on his critical radio message which was broadcast during Sunday’s 70th Anniversary Grand Prix at Silverstone.

Vettel’s race at Silverstone began in the worst possible way with the German spinning at Turn 1 and subsequently dropping to the back of the grid.

During the mid-part of the race, Vettel said the following over team radio: “It is in the gap that we didn’t like. We spoke about it this morning. I’ll hang in there, but you know that you’ve messed up.”

Vettel explained the message after the race, stating he was unhappy with Ferrari’s decision to pit him into traffic.

“Well we spoke this morning and said there was no point pitting knowing, knowingly, knowing that we will run into traffic and that’s exactly what we did,” Vettel said.

“We went also onto a hard tyre, which we then only had on for ten laps, probably not even that, so it didn’t make any sense.

“I mean why would you put the hard for ten laps and put the medium for 20 laps. So I was running out of tyres towards the end so we spoke about exactly that so yeah. Not I guess not the best work we all could have done today.”

Vettel was once again comprehensively beaten by Ferrari team-mate Charles Leclerc, who finished fourth.

The four-time world champion once again had no explanation for his struggles.

“I don’t know I mean I guess, something is there that I’m missing so I’m not sure what it is, nevertheless I try to get out of bed and do as best as I can, for sure today we could have been higher up.

“For my side with the spin, I’m not sure what happened there also with the strategy we could have recovered better. I think the main difference is we don’t have clean races from where we start. He had a couple of clean races so far so.”