Could Vettel have avoided VSC which helped Hamilton beat Leclerc? Binotto explains

Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto says there was no chance of Sebastian Vettel making it back to the pits and preventing the VSC period which proved terminal to team-mate Charles Leclerc's winning hopes at the Russian Grand Prix.

Vettel had slipstreamed his way into the lead off the line from third on the grid and was ahead until the pitstop phase, when he was left out longer and Leclerc benefitted from fresh tyres to close the pit window.

The German had little chance to make amends as he ground to a halt in the final sector, bringing out a VSC period which allowed Lewis Hamilton to take the lead from Leclerc, and ultimately the race win.

However, Binotto says it would have been unsafe to ask Vettel to continue to the pits after suffering the MGU-K outage.

"We got a problem on the power unit, on the hybrid side of the power unit, and we got a loss of insulation on the car," Binotto explained.

"For safety reasons, we called him to stop immediately.

"Of course it's a shame, because 100 metres later was the pit lane, but it was the safest action we could do for Seb, and the safety aspects."

Binotto confirmed that Ferrari had schemed on lap one to tow Vettel past Lewis Hamilton, as well as Leclerc, only for the power failure to spoil their plans.

"As a team obviously the victory was key," he said. "So we decided that the most important thing for us was to be first and second at the first lap.

"By being first and second we would have control and [be able to] manage the pace and control the positions, which is what was happening, because being first and second as a matter of fact we were controlling the race.

"Without any reliability issues certainly we would have kept positions after the pitstops."

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