2024 Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix Highlights

Scuderia Ferrari HP picked up plenty of points and had one driver on the podium in the Las Vegas Grand Prix courtesy of Carlos Sainz, who crossed the line third ahead of Charles Leclerc. The race was far from perfect but nevertheless the team has made up 12 points on McLaren, closing the gap to the Constructors’ championship leaders to 24. The laps run on the Medium tyres in the first stint weighed heavily on the team’s performance as the SF-24 struggled more than its rivals with graining. But it was clear that today Mercedes was clearly quicker than the rest. Today, Ferrari was the second best team and that was reflected in the result.

The season continues immediately with the teams now packing their bags and heading off on the long flight to Qatar, for the penultimate round of the season. It’s a Sprint weekend, which means there are 59 Constructors’ championship points up for grabs.

Carlos Sainz #55

Considering the pace Mercedes had today, I think we maximised the team’s points, and even without the misunderstanding at the pit entry on my second stop, I don’t think we would have been able to stay ahead of Lewis. After what we had seen in practice, I expected to be more competitive, but we struggled quite a lot with graining today. We will keep fighting in the following races to keep the battle for the Constructors’ title open until the end. On to Qatar.

Charles Leclerc #16

I finished the race where I started it today, so it wasn’t that exciting, but if you look at the details, it was quite an eventful one. Unfortunately, we degraded the fronts on the first stint on Mediums; then, we could return to the Hards, which were working better. Big congratulations to Max (Verstappen). He deserves this championship title, he has had a fantastic season and always maximised his results which has paid off for him. It gives us motivation to be even stronger next year and hopefully we can put him under some more pressure then. We will push hard in the last two races to finish the season ahead of McLaren.

Frédéric Vasseur – Team Principal

First of all, congratulations to Max Verstappen on winning the title. As for our race, we struggled a lot in the first stint on the Mediums, losing about two seconds per lap towards the end and again at the end of the second stint, the first one on the Hards. Overall, our pace on the Hards was decent, but we lost too much time in the early stages, and generally, our pace was a bit too inconsistent. In the end, today’s race was a case of damage limitation, but at some point, we have to score more points than everyone else, and we cannot just settle for this damage limitation if we want to keep the fight open. We scored 12 points more than McLaren and 16 more than Red Bull. Let’s see what we can do next week in Qatar, a track that on paper does not suit us best, but in which there is a Sprint and more points on offer. We need to do a better job as a team at the next race.

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