Fred Vasseur’s anger over how Lewis Hamilton was misrepresented over team radio during Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix was justified.

The team radio messages selected for use over the world feed broadcast suggested that Hamilton had created a mess by resisting a team instruction to allow his teammate to overtake him.

Why was Ferrari’s Fred Vasseur angry about team radio messages?

The Ferrari team boss was annoyed by what he saw as selective cherry-picking of team radio messages for the world feed, which misrepresented what had actually occurred during the Chinese Grand Prix.

The messages played out over the world feed, as would then be broadcast by the likes of Sky F1, suggested Hamilton had been instructed by his race engineer Ricardo Adami to allow Leclerc through at Turn 14 – only for Hamilton to not do so.

With Hamilton struggling for pace in front of Leclerc, releasing Leclerc was the logical choice – but Hamilton appeared to be holding up the team’s progress by resisting. This was followed by a radio message from Hamilton retorting to Adami that he would allow Leclerc through, “When he’s closer, yeah.”

With Leclerc getting on radio to say, “This is a shame, the pace is there,” Hamilton then let his teammate through at Turn 1 on Lap 21, after having told his engineer, “I’ll say when we can swap” after receiving another request to release Leclerc.

But the reality of the situation was that Hamilton was not instructed to let Leclerc through, and thus the seven-time F1 World Champion was not being obstinate in the face of being told what to do.

Instead, team radio would show that Hamilton had actually initially made the suggestion to his team that he release Leclerc due to his own struggles for pace, saying on Lap 18, “I think I’m gonna let Charles go because I’m struggling.”

With Adami telling Hamilton that Turn 14 was the right place to swap, and Leclerc’s engineer Bryan Bozzi telling his driver the same, Hamilton’s failure to immediately relinquish position thus appeared to paint the British driver in a bad light.

This led Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur to call out Formula One Management (FOM) for attempting to create drama out of the situation.

“I think this is a joke from FOM because the first call came from Lewis,” he told the media in Shanghai. “Lewis asked us to swap, but to make the show, to create the mess around the situation, they broadcast only the second part of the question.

“I will discuss with them.”

FOM has since confirmed that talks with Ferrari have been held, and released a statement to deny that messages had been cherry-picked.

“There was absolutely no intention of presenting a misleading narrative regarding the Ferrari team radio,” an F1 spokesperson told PlanetF1.com

“Due to other situations developing during the race, the message from Lewis was not played but this was not intentional.”

The incident came just a week after Hamilton found himself at the centre of another team radio furore after his messages to Adami during the Australian Grand Prix, in which a stressed-sounding Hamilton had to repeat himself a few times to request he be left alone about some information as he specified he wanted to be “left to it”.

Speaking ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix, Hamilton said, “I mean, naturally, everyone over-egged. It was literally just a back-and-forth.

“I was very polite in how I had suggested it. I said: ‘leave it to me, please’. I wasn’t saying ‘F you’. I wasn’t swearing. So it was just at that point, I was really struggling with the car and I needed full focus on these couple of things.

“We’re getting to know each other. He’s obviously had two champions or more in the past and there’s no issues between us still.

“Go and listen to the radio calls with others and their engineers, far worse.

“But unfortunately, you [the media] make… the conversation that Max has with an engineer over the years, the abuse that the poor guy’s taken and you never write about it, but you wrote about the smallest little discussion I had with mine.”

It’s perhaps no surprise then that Ferrari was annoyed by how Hamilton was misrepresented over team radio in China – and it’s indicative of the importance of painting the full picture when it comes to telling the story of a race.

F1 must not fall into trap of chasing entertainment over reality

Much like journalists have to aim for balanced and fair reporting, the omission of pertinent information can falsify the narrative and, with the public and fans being informed about the sport’s representatives through such means, remaining truthful through this medium is essential.

Certainly, there’s no reason to believe that F1 has chosen to pursue a path of trying to shape narratives in an effort to create more drama and entertainment by employing such measures, but it is understood that some teams are less than happy with the direction of travel FOM has taken, feeling that the commercial rights holder is employing tactics akin to what Netflix use on the hit TV series Drive to Survive.

While there’s nothing wrong with being selective with radio messages, given the sheer volume of messages transmitted between drivers and the pit wall, it’s the responsibility of F1 to ensure that the messages chosen don’t create an untrue narrative –  a scenario that one source indicated to PlanetF1.com as being “totally unacceptable”.

As an example (selected by this writer and not suggestive of any team complaint), Oliver Bearman’s celebratory “Ciao” messages upon overtaking others could be seen as somewhat arrogant in isolation, which he seemed to realise by admitting to being embarrassed by having had those messages broadcast when he spoke to media after the chequered flag.

To balance this, ensuring other drivers’ celebratory messages in similar circumstances are broadcast is the fair way to proceed – which is, in fairness, exactly what FOM usually does.

By cherry-picking messages, the possibility – however unintentional – is that fans can be misled, with opinions skewed by the misrepresentation.

Separately, another key consideration to take into account is how messages with swearing are treated – and it’s here that the balance between the entertainment factor and the regulations becomes trickier to manage.

With FOM monitoring driver’s live radio broadcasts in real-time, choosing which messages to broadcast, delays are factored into this process to allow for messages with swearing to be censored and broadcast on the world feed.

While providing insight into the stresses the drivers are under, as well as being great entertainment, messages with bleeped-out cursing aren’t unusual to hear on the world feed – and this is completely at odds with the regulatory side of the sport, which has moved to clamp down on swearing behaviours.

In a sport in which the governing body, the FIA, can issue huge fines or race bans and points deductions, what message does it send out to then have the commercial rights holder broadcasting messages with these transgressions presented as dramatic and entertaining?

This ties in with the marketing approach taken with Drive to Survive, which leaned into making superstars of the likes of Guenther Steiner and Daniel Ricciardo by way of their choice of vocabulary.

It sends a contradictory message, suggesting that FOM isn’t in complete agreement with the FIA’s stance on swearing. While the context of swear words is being taken into account, meaning team radio swearing isn’t likely to trigger punishments any time soon, not weighing in behind the regulations by opting against broadcasting such messages on air only further highlights this discrepancy.

Of course, a decision to blanket-ignore messages with swearing will just lead to all the teams cursing all the time to ensure some privacy, but this escalation would likely lead to an even more draconian stance and, perhaps, the inclusion of team radio and the ignoring of context when it comes to handing out the new penalties.

Either way, it’s difficult to see how the use of sweary messages, in any context, can be used for the purposes of entertainment in a sport in which the regulations can punish the competitors for use of the same.

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