Heading into Baku, Ferrari should already have beaten Mercedes in one race – and would have done had Charles Leclerc’s engine not gone sick in the closing laps of Bahrain when he was on the way to a dominant victory.
And had Ferrari put together a perfect weekend in Baku, things could have been very different for them there, too. Just as in Bahrain, Charles Leclerc looked like the key man, but this time it was his fault that maiden win got away from him.
A crash in second qualifying took the 21-year-old out. His lap time was still quick enough to make it into the top 10, but the car was in pieces so he could not take part. That meant qualifying 10th – which became eighth on the grid after penalties for other drivers.
From there, a victory was always going to be tough if there was not a safety car to even things out. He led for a while because of strategy variation. But Ferrari did not help his quest to beat Red Bull’s Max Verstappen to fourth place by costing him eight seconds, by apparently needlessly leaving him out for two laps after he had finally been caught and passed by the leaders.
After that, he was too far back and all that was left was to go for the point for fastest lap. The crash also meant that Leclerc had to start the race on the medium tyres, which he said would not have been the case had qualifying run to plan.
But that begs the question of why he and Vettel did their first runs in second qualifying on the mediums in the first place. The answer to that was that they had to – but that was their choice, born of their run-plan through practice.
Ferrari had used an extra set of the faster soft tyres in final practice on Saturday. Mercedes, by contrast, had run a set of mediums at the start of the session – a deliberate choice to ensure their drivers could use softs all the way through qualifying. They felt that was better on a track where grip levels are always changing, the temperature is dropping through a qualifying session run as the sun is setting, and where grip is low anyway.
Why, Mercedes felt, give their drivers the complication of having to adapt from soft tyres to medium and then back again in the middle of qualifying when things were already difficult enough anyway? There was also the risk, by running mediums first in second qualifying, that a crash and a red flag could jeopardise a second run, and with it potentially even a place in the final session.
Charles Leclerc was very hard on himself after his crash, calling himself “stupid”. And clearly he should not have done it. But the tyres were a contributory factor. What happened, he said, was that he braked at the same point into the tight Turn Eight on mediums as he had before on softs – and the grip level was not there to take it.
“The performance was there to do pole position,” Charles said.
Even with Charles out of the picture, Sebastian Vettel should have been in a position to fight for pole. But he did his qualifying lap without a tow, and that was because Mercedes tricked Ferrari into following them out of the pits early – only for their drivers to stop at the end of the pit lane and pretend to do practice starts, letting Sebastian past. Now running on his own at the front of the line of cars, he opted to stay there and ensure he got his tyres in the right window, rather than slow and let someone past and go for the two. Vettel said he felt it was the right call in the end, but he admitted in the same sentence that he “sort of regretted” he hadn’t taken the gamble of going for the tow.
On top of driver errors and occasionally questionable operational management (a running theme through last year as well) Ferrari are also struggling to consistently get the tyres into the temperature window at which they operate best.
“The secret this year seems to be the tyres and maybe we are missing something,” Vettel said. “We struggle a bit more with the tyres than in previous years.”
The German added: “Obviously the last four races, on average, we were not quite there, so I think we are not the favourites going to (the next race in) Barcelona. But the team is in good spirits. We have another couple of stuff going on the car, so we need to chase them down.
“We are looking to hopefully a smooth weekend. Our first four weekends haven’t been that smooth. But it will be crucial to catch them and turn things around.”
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