Sebastian Vettel was furious with Charles Leclerc at the Bahrain Grand Prix, but after talking to his team-mate, says it’s no big deal. At the race restart following Romain Grosjean’s horror crash, Leclerc dived down the inside at Turn 1, taking Vettel by surprise and causing him to drop back.
“Not again! He can’t just do that as if I wasn’t there. It’s the same as Austria, seriously,” he said on the team radio.
“I should’ve crashed, maybe it was the better option. All morning we talk about giving room.”
In the paddock immediately after the race, he remained unhappy, and said that he’d talk to his team-mate about the incident.
“I lost ground at the start because I have been very considerate of Charles,” he told Sky Germany.
“I don’t think that angle is normally possible unless I open the door so much to make it possible. I got a little annoyed because it was unnecessary. But okay. I lost a lot of positions after that and then you saw we had our difficulties.”
“I will talk to him. In the end, it is the same as in Austria and if I don’t look, we’d crash again.”
The pair did discuss what happened, and after doing so, Vettel somewhat changed his tune, feeling that the incident wasn’t that big a deal.
“We don’t need to make a big deal out of it,” the German said.
“It was tight. I believe if you have three cars in the first corner at times it works, but most of the time it doesn’t.”
“We spoke about it, we move on, no big deal.”
Leclerc meanwhile denied Vettel’s claims that it was a repeat of what happened in Austria earlier in the year when the pair came together, although he did concede the gap he left was perhaps too small.
“On my side, the only thing I can say is that surely it was extremely tight,” the Monegasque stated.
“But on the other hand, unlike in the Styrian Grand Prix where I didn’t put myself in a visible place, this time I tried for him to see me.”
“There was a very little gap, I went for it and I made sure that he saw me. You could argue there was probably not enough gap between our cars, being in the same team.”
