Ferrari wasn’t the only team to make the wrong decision at the start of the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia by opting for slicks, but no one did a better job of recovering and limiting the damage.
A race that seemed headed for disaster after just a couple of laps ended with Lewis Hamilton and Carlos Leclerc recovering to achieve a decent result and finish third and fourth.
Yes, they were flattered by him. late retirement of George Russell moving them both up, while Isack Hadjar hampered by late battery issue and therefore could not defend himself much.
But they did most of the work themselves with excellent handling in what was clearly a very competitive package, performance that inevitably left ferrari Fans are wondering what would have happened if the right decision had been made from the beginning.
“I think 50 percent of the cars were for slicks, 50 percent for wets,” the team principal said. Fred Vasseur of tire choice. “You can’t try it, you just take a look at the asphalt in front of you in the pit lane and it sure wasn’t the good one.
“It’s not that I don’t regret it. It’s clear that it was better to start with the interests, but we made the decision with the information we had.”
In essence, the track dried more slowly than anyone expected, given past experience at Sepang.
“When you have to make a decision, you try to base it on good parameters,” Vasseur said. “But of course, at the end of the day, we have to be clear that it was not the right decision, that it would have been much better for us to start with interest. But we were considering that it would dry out very quickly, and so on. The pit stop [loss] It was also quite long, 26 seconds.”
Leclerc’s career changed when he came into contact with Nico Hulkenberg at the beginning, and went into the pits immediately to change the interests and a new front wing.
Several drivers who opted for slick tires also abandoned them early, in some cases even before the first flying lap, but Hamilton opted to stay out, insisting it was right to take a risk.
“We let him [have] the election,” Vasseur said. “Ultimately, in this situation, they are in the car. When we tell you we’re ready, it’s just to tell you that you can come in if you think it’s the right decision.
“He had a very good race, with a very fluid strategy. He was able to do a very long stint with very good management of the soft tires.”
So what was the potential if the Ferraris had made a different decision and started with the intermediates?
“I don’t know, because the race is different when you have to pass 20 cars instead of being in front,” Vasseur said. “But I wasn’t very optimistic after lap 1! You never know, also because with dirty air it is much more difficult, energy management, etc.
“But the pace was solid, and when Lewis was at the end of his stint on the soft, he was still doing a very good lap time.”
The race pace was certainly impressive and ultimately that was what propelled Hamilton and Leclerc up the positions.
“Yesterday we showed the same pace,” Vasseur said. “We were on the front row, but we were also on the front row in Baku. But the race pace was much better this weekend.
“They are also completely different conditions. In the last two or three races we didn’t have any problems.” [degradation]. This weekend the race was also difficult for the drivers to manage, because we did all the free practice with 60 degrees of track temperature, and then you do the race with 30 degrees less, and it is a different track.
“We were all a little lost. I think when we restarted after the safety car, at one point there were seven cars on soft, seven on medium, seven on hard. It’s not very common.”
So can Ferrari maintain that good form next weekend?
“Let me have a beer tonight and tomorrow morning we’ll talk about Singapore!” Vasseur joked. “Surely it will be another, but each one is different, we’ll see.
“We were hoping to do a good performance this weekend. I think we did that. We hope to do a good performance next week as well, and I hope we do.”