Sky Sports were forced to apologise on Saturday afternoon following a sweary interview from Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur. The Frenchman was discussing the stress of being the Scuderia’s team principal at Monza during the Italian Grand Prix weekend.
When asked about the pressures of holding the Ferrari team principal on such a momentous weekend for the team, Vasseur told the Sky Sports presenters: “It’s quite emotional I tried all [of] the week to calm down everybody, to say ‘guys, we can’t score more points in Monza than somewhere else. Take it relatively easy and so.’
“But this is the bulls***. When you arrive on Thursday morning in Monza with all the guys in red and so, then you can feel it, you can feel the passion, the emotion, and for us we have to take it as a positive one to get an extra push.”
The Italian Grand Prix weekend is the biggest on the calendar for the Maranello-based team who, for the second year running, have produced a special one-off livery and race suit design to commemorate the weekend.
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Vasseur had just watched his driver Carlos Sainz top the timing sheets in FP3 when he gave the interview with the Scuderia well-placed to battle Red Bull for pole position off the back of a strong start to their home race.
Speaking about Ferrari’s pace earlier in the weekend, Sainz explained: “It can’t get much better than that. It was a smooth day, to be honest. It’s great to be back at a track like Monza and from the first lap of FP1 to feel the car normal again after such a difficult weekend at Zandvoort.
“As soon as we put the car on track here for some reason it just adapted a lot better and it was a lot easier to set up and drive it per corner. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to be P1 tomorrow and in the race, but at least the feeling is much better.”
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The 29-year-old went on to address Ferrari’s chances of victory in front of the home crowd, stating: “Yeah, dreaming is for free, no? This is one of my favourite sayings. Especially in tracks like this, I think we can all dream and it’s for free, no one can take it away from us.
“But being realistic, also looking at our race pace, that’s when we started seeing the true pace of the Red Bull, they were clearly again three-tenths, half a second ahead in race pace, and over 50 something laps that’s a lot of lap time.”
Sainz ended FP3 just under a tenth up on championship leader Max Verstappen, while Charles Leclerc finished the session in P4 following a couple of scrappy runs on the soft-compound tyre towards the end of his stint.
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