Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen had been running in the top three in the second half of the race, before losing out to an aggressive strategy call from Mercedes.
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Ferrari had the choice of leaving Raikkonen out on his soft tyres for the final 16 laps and hoping Hamilton did not make up the deficit his stop had created, or immediately pitting in response.
Had Raikkonen stayed out to the finish, then the Ferrari driver would have held an initial advantage over Hamilton of around 25 seconds.
But despite ending up in fourth, Ferrari boss Maurizio Arrivabene said: “To be 100 per cent sure you have to look at the data”. We took a decision based on our data, and now the exercise to do is verify if our data was right.
“If you think about the opposite, having huge degradation and Mercedes attacking us, it would have been insane”.
“We gained one place, but that’s not really what we’re looking for”.
After the race, Raikkonen was unsure about the strategy decision – and believed he could have made it to the end, like race victor Nico Rosberg.
“But would they have caught us or been able to pass us? I don’t know yet”.
“There are certain things we could have done but obviously afterwards it’s very easy to say”. “I don’t know yet, I think by now we’ve probably had a close look but it felt like the front anti-roll bar broke”.
“There was not much we could do anymore by that point”.
Sebastian Vettel was left fuming on Saturday when mechanical problems knocked him out of the first round of qualifying for the Singapore Grand Prix – meaning last year’s victor will start from the back of the grid.
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“Obviously I was hoping for a safety vehicle at some point to get me close to the leaders”. An early Safety Car and the hardest compound in Pirelli’s range for the weekend made progress slow early on, though Vettel’s stop for ultra-stop tyres on lap 24 put him on the quickest tyre and helped him climb the order.
