F1: Sebastian Vettel steps in to defend Lewis Hamilton over ‘unfair question’ after Bahrain GP

The Bahrain Grand Prix was a race in which each of the top three finishers could come away with a degree of satisfaction, but only Sebastian Vettel did so without also feeling a measure of frustration.

Ferrari won after changing their strategy by gambling successfully on getting a set of soft-compound Pirelli tyres to last almost 40 laps, and making only one pit stop rather than the planned two. It was a close-run thing, but it enabled him to double his world championship points score and left arch-rival Lewis Hamilton on his back foot.

Hamilton’s team-mate Valtteri Bottas pushed as much as he could in the closing stages on harder and more durable medium tyres, but failed to get the job done by just six-tenth of a second.

And Hamilton himself, who finished six and a half seconds behind the Ferrari, was happy to have hauled from ninth on the grid to third after another hard drive, but was frustrated by communication problems which left hum uncertain how hard he could push at times.

Vettel’s drive in Bahrain’s twilight was a masterclass in keeping your nerve, and if he goes on to win a fifth world tile at the end of the season, he can look back with pride on the foundation he laid here.

He led off the line and though wingman Kimi Raikkonen lost second place to Bottas, the Ferrari team leader had things well under control by the time he pitted to switch from the supersoft Pirelli tyres to the softs on the 18th lap.

Bottas took the lead for two laps after Raikkonen pitted on lap 19 for similar softs, then handed that lead to Hamilton when he made his own stop on the 20th lap.

Hamilton survived a clash with Max Verstappen on the second lap, and later said that if he had any chance of winning he had lost it by being too cautious in the early going, before pulling off the overtaking move of the race – possibly of the year—when he passed not one or two, but three cars in one go heading into the first corner on the fifth lap, one of them driven by Fernando Alonso.

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“It definitely wasn’t an easy manoeuvre to pull off,” Hamilton said after passing Alonso’s McLaren, Nico Hulkenberg’s Renault and Esteban Ocon’s Force India, all of whom were fighting with each other. “It was quite risky, but I had lost so much ground at start trying to be very cautious with some of the people ahead, that I had to come back somehow.”

Indeed, with Hulkenberg clashing with Kevin Magnussen, and Brendon Hartley tapping Sergio Perez into a spin, the early laps were like a UFC fight on wheels. Hamilton was thus understating it when he described his three-in-one manoeuvre as “very helpful.”

Less so, in his opinion, was the incident with Verstappen’s Red Bull, when the Dutchman squeezed between Alonso’s McLaren and the Mercedes and caught his left rear wheel on Hamilton’s right front. The Dutchman sustained the puncture which led to his retirement, making it a horrible day for the team as Daniel Ricciardo’s car stopped on that lap with electrical trouble.

“The coming together with Max was an unnecessary collision,” said Hamilton, who believed that, having completed the move, Verstappen then kept him out wide when he didn’t need to.

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“I was ahead quite a long time in the corner before accepting defeat,” he said, “so he no longer needed to keep going wide because I had already backed out. He’s a young driver with fantastic pace, but he’s still learning and he doesn’t always make the right decision. Red Bull have a car that should be getting good results, and I’m sure if either Fernando Alonso or I was driving it today, we would have scored good points. I went through that stuff when I was younger, so I know how it is.

“There needs to be certain respect between drivers. I didn’t feel that was respectful and it was a silly manoeuvre for himself as he didn’t finish the race. He’s made quite a few mistakes recently, so it was unnecessary for him to do that.”

Later he was asked if he had described the Dutchman as a “d**khead”. But before he could answer, Vettel stepped in.

“I think it’s not a fair question. We’ve all been in that situation, we fight someone, we go sometimes wheel-to-wheel, it’s close and you have a lot of adrenalin going… Do you think, comparing to football, if you have a microphone on a football player’s mouth, that everything he says is a nice message when a guy tackles him and or fouls him? So I don’t think it’s justified to give us these kind of s*** questions and making up a story out of nothing, if we are just racing and we are full of adrenalin and sometime we say these things. I mean, if I hit you in your face, you’re not going to say ‘oh, Sebastian, that wasn’t nice’. It’s a human reaction. Sometimes I feel it’s all a bit blown up and artificial if we have these questions, trying to make a story out of nothing. So, don’t take it personal, but I think we should cut it right there.”

When Hamilton overtook Pierre Gasly’s superbly driven Toro Rosso on the eighth lap, he moved into fourth place and into a position to take the lead when the three leaders made their pit stops. Because of his grid penalty he had opted to qualify and start on softs so that he could run a longer opening stint in the hope of making up ground, and took the lead until Vettel, on his new rubber, overtook him before he made his own pit stop on the 26th lap.

Where both Ferraris had switched to the soft compound tyres, apparently planning two stops, Mercedes put both their cars on mediums, opting instead to run to the finish.

Bit by bit Vettel was able to open up his lead over Bottas, and stretched it to as much as 8.1s by the 43rd of the 57 laps. Meanwhile, Raikkonen’s planned second stop on the 35th lap proved to be a disaster. The mechanics had fitted three supersoft tyres but the mechanic on the left rear wheel was still working when the Finn was signalled to rejoin. As the Ferrari lurched forward on its mismatched set of tyres, Francesco Cigarini sustained compound fractures of his left tibia and fibula and was taken to the Bahrain Defence Force Hospital in Manama. Raikkonen was immediately told to stop his car, but the team were later fined 50,000 euros for releasing him unsafely.

Both Mercedes were able to push so hard on their harder tyres that it became clear that they would overtake Vettel when he made his scheduled second stop, so Ferrari decided to gamble that they could still get to the finish without stopping again.

“Obviously our plan was a bit different when we started,” Vettel said. “I lost a little bit at the end of the first stint, Valtteri was closing in, and then, I think, I knew we didn’t have the freedom any more to react. That’s the advantage if you are behind, you can wait, and obviously Valtteri did that and they decided to go on a different strategy, trying to win the race. Then our only chance, as the tyres were holding on quite well, was to stay out, and it just worked. Obviously if we pitted again with five laps to go we finish third, but equally I felt if we pitted with 20 or 15 laps to go, it would be difficult to make progress because I guess the medium tyres were more consistent. And then it would have been much harder to get past Lewis, initially, and then to chase down Valtteri.

“So we gambled and obviously we responded well after it looked like they put us in checkmate. I’m obviously extremely happy that we could still come out on top.”

That bit of inspired gamesmanship set up a brilliant victory after a nail-biting finish, with Bottas just six-tenths off the win, and Hamilton a further 5.8s adrift.