Ferrari, Hamilton, and Leclerc criticize the pit wall. Vasseur defends himself

The atmosphere at Ferrari isn’t exactly relaxed following the strategic error in the early stages of the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia: the Maranello team’s decision to put slick tires on the track—which wasn’t yet dry—wasn’t a good one. “For my part, I pulled into the pit lane, looked at the track, and saw that it was still wet,” Hamilton explained. “I went to the pit wall, looked at the track, and said, ‘But it’s still wet.’ The longer the race was delayed, the more it should have dried out, but instead there were a lot of splashes on the track.”

“We thought Max would also put on dry-weather tires. We thought it was the right choice, but it wasn’t. By the time we realized it, it was too late. Keeping the car on the track was really tough,” said the Brit, who then pulled off a perfect comeback, climbing from 17th to third place.

Charles Leclerc was even more direct: “We made the wrong choice, and there are certainly teams that consistently make better decisions than we do in those conditions. I’m thinking specifically of Red Bull, and that’s where we need to take a step forward.”

Team principal Frederic Vasseur commented on the strategic error as follows: “When you’re convinced that one option is better than the others, you have to make the same choice for both cars. McLaren, Red Bull, and even Mercedes did the same. Then 50% of the cars chose intermediates and the other 50% chose dry tires. It’s always easier to say after the race that one choice was better than the other, but it went the way it went. When you’re in the pit lane, you only have the information coming in from the track to the pits, and you don’t find out until the first lap whether the choice was right or wrong—and by then, it’s too late to change it.”