Ferrari "screwed up" at Italian GP, says Marchionne

Just one week after Sebastian Vettel pushed Lewis Hamilton hard for victory in Belgium, Ferrari had no answer to the pace of its main championship rival.

Vettel finished a whopping 36 seconds behind Hamilton to leave Ferrari chasing answers about what had gone wrong.

But rather than accept that the result was damage limitation – with Vettel only losing 10 points to Hamilton on a weekend when the gap could have been much bigger – Marchionne said his outfit had to take full responsibility for not having built on its Spa performance.

"I think we just screwed up," Marchionne told German broadcaster RTL. "The set-up for the car was wrong. I think we underestimated the circuit.

"I think we screwed up from Belgium, from Spa, into here. Now, we need to go back to the factory and find out which way the car went sideways. But we will be back in Singapore."

Ferrari will return to its Maranello factory this week to try to better understand why both Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen struggled to get comfortable with their car over the Monza weekend, especially under braking.

Matters were also not helped by it being unable to try set-up improvements on Saturday morning when, after a difficult opening day, the final free practice session was hit by rain.

Speaking about the weekend, Raikkonen said: "I think we lacked speed unfortunately and then the balance maybe wasn't correct.

"We changed [the setup] after Friday and obviously in the race was the first time we tried. But I think with the setup, it [the result] was not going to be awfully different.

"So I think it's something we have to fix in this kind of circuit with the low downforce."

Vettel's pace later in the race was also affected by him driving more cautiously in light of the power steering issue that had resulted in him running down the escape road on lap 40.

Additional reporting by Christian Nimmervoll