Eight reasons Mercedes lost the Bahrain GP
Mercedes' pace advantage in Bahrain looked clearer than at any other time in 2017 so far, yet it lost the race to Ferrari. The reasons why were complicated and numerous
By Ben Anderson
@BenAndersonAuto
Published on Monday April 17th 2017
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If you qualify one-two for a Formula 1 race, logic dictates you should head home with a victory trophy in your hands.
Mercedes locked out the front row for the first time this season, with the biggest pace advantage we've seen so far in 2017, yet somehow it was Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari that left Bahrain grasping the spoils of glory.
That Mercedes departed the Bahrain Grand Prix without one of its drivers having stood atop the podium is a situation that owes itself to what team boss Toto Wolff called "a perfect storm" of "many marginal losses" through the early phase of the race.
In fact, a confluence of eight particular circumstances came together to undo Mercedes in Bahrain, allowing Vettel to retake the lead of the Formula 1 world championship and Ferrari to ascend to the top of the constructors' table.
The trouble began, as it sometimes does, before the race had even started. Valtteri Bottas claimed pole position with a brilliantly accomplished performance in qualifying on Saturday, but team-mate Lewis Hamilton felt top spot should have been his own again, but for a DRS malfunction on his final Q3 lap and a small mistake at the final corner.
Given he would turn out to be comfortably Mercedes' fastest driver in this race, Hamilton not starting on pole ultimately proved very costly.
Nevertheless, Bottas should still have been plenty quick enough to get the job done, but a problem setting the Pirelli tyre pressures while his Mercedes sat on the grid put him into immediate trouble in the race.
"Our generator broke on the grid and we couldn't bleed Valtteri's tyres, so we were starting with the completely wrong tyre pressures on his car," Wolff explained, meaning that Bottas's tyres had too much air in them for the start. "We knew he would be struggling."
The next part of that 'perfect storm' was Hamilton slipping from second to third on the run to the first corner, with Vettel gaining superior momentum off the grid and swooping around the outside of the Mercedes under braking.
"Initially, [it was] a very good start," said Hamilton. "I hit perfect on my target, then just had a bit of wheelspin in the second phase."
That allowed Vettel to immediately apply pressure to Bottas, who not only lost the protection of a Hamilton-shaped buffer to Ferrari but was naturally struggling to build any sort of meaningful advantage while sliding around on overinflated Pirellis.
"It was crucial for us to get between them to not allow them to get in front and pull away and do their thing - upset them a bit," said Vettel.
"We all had more or less the same start, and Lewis stuck with Valtteri so I could take a risk under braking and get the move done [around the outside of Turn 1].
"After a couple of laps, I was on Valtteri's gearbox for the first stint and not falling back too much."
BOTTAS VS VETTEL IN THE FIRST STINT
On his tyre problems, Bottas explains: "I don't know the exact amount but it was more than one psi. The effect was basically big overheating - it felt like [driving] on marbles, the rear tyres just not working like they are supposed to.
"They are overheating from the surface, from a smaller part of the tyre. You're balance limited and the traction is poor."
On Saturday Vettel was quite surprised to have qualified almost half a second shy of pole position, given how good his Ferrari felt around the Sakhir circuit, but Bottas's early tyre struggles, combined with jumping Hamilton at the start, was crucial in putting Vettel in position to "upset" Mercedes.
Bottas could not pull away from Vettel through the opening sequence of the race, which in turn backed Hamilton - who also struggled for speed initially - into the fast-starting Red Bulls of Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo.
Barely more than three seconds covered the top five cars when Ferrari pulled the strategic trigger and brought Vettel into the pits for fresh super-softs at the end of lap 10 of 57. He rejoined the track in a neat gap in traffic between Sergio Perez's Force India and Jolyon Palmer's Renault.
Verstappen followed suit next time around, but his rear brakes failed on the out-lap, which sent his Red Bull off the circuit and into the barrier on the outside of Turn 4. Shortly afterwards, Carlos Sainz Jr's Toro Rosso came out of the pits and speared into Lance Stroll's Williams under braking for Turn 1. The contact left Stroll's car stranded on the inside of the circuit at the corner's exit, so officials called the safety car into action.
Rather than undoing Ferrari's strategic masterstroke, as it had done in China a fortnight prior, this scenario further complicated matters for Mercedes. Bottas dived for the pits at the end of lap 13, but lost around three seconds to a slow tyre change.
Meanwhile, on the in-lap Hamilton was trying desperately to give Mercedes enough margin to do a double stop, but ended up copping a five-second penalty for delaying Ricciardo's entry to the pitlane with what officials deemed was unnecessarily slow and erratic driving.
"I've only been in this scenario twice - once with Nico [Rosberg] in Monaco I think, and in Monaco I didn't have a big enough gap, so I knew I needed a five-second gap between myself and Valtteri," Hamilton explained. "So I slowed down to try to increase that gap."
Hamilton also lost time at the pitstop itself, thanks to the same wheelgun problem that affected Bottas's stop.
"It looks like we had a power loss on the guns," explained Wolff. "And we couldn't operate the guns as they would normally function."
The "domino effect" of qualifying second, getting overtaken by Vettel at the start, getting bottled up with the Red Bulls in the first stint, getting penalised for driving too slowly in the pitlane, then suffering further delay at the stop itself, put Hamilton seriously on the back foot.
He lay fourth as the race restarted on lap 17, but immediately dispatched Ricciardo, who was struggling to maintain temperature in his Red Bull's soft Pirellis, to run third behind Vettel and Bottas. Unfortunately, Hamilton then spent 10 laps stuck behind his Mercedes team-mate, who briefly but unsuccessfully threatened Vettel's supremacy on the outside of Turn 4 after the restart.
HAMILTON'S TIME LOSS TO VETTEL IN STINT TWO
Hamilton lost 4.822s to Vettel while Mercedes debated whether to move Bottas aside for his faster team-mate. Eventually, Mercedes made the call, which allowed Hamilton to claim second place with an uncontested move into Turn 1 at the start of lap 27.
"You're always more intelligent afterwards," said Wolff, when asked whether Mercedes waited too long to switch its drivers around. "It's a call you don't like to make.
"Both have to have a chance of winning, and it's only when the moment comes you realise if you're not changing anything you're going to lose the race."
Hamilton closed to within four seconds of the leading Ferrari over the next seven laps, before Vettel dived into the pits to make his second and final stop on lap 33. Vettel emerged behind Ferrari team-mate Kimi Raikkonen (having another difficult race outside of the lead fight), but was quickly past and back into second.
Mercedes kept Hamilton out until the end of lap 41, at which point he had to serve his five-second penalty. He emerged from the pits trailing Vettel by just a shade under 20s, with 16 laps left in which to work miracles.
HAMILTON HUNTS VETTEL IN FINAL STINT
Hamilton was 0.829s per lap faster than Vettel on average during that final charge on soft Pirellis, which included diving back past Bottas when he made way on the brakes into Turn 13 on lap 47, and spending time under yellow flags when Marcus Ericsson parked his broken Sauber on the outside of the approach to Turn 4.
It was a heroic effort, but ultimately Hamilton finished 6.660s behind the winning Ferrari, having called off his charge before the end.
"I gave everything I have to close that gap," Hamilton said. "When I came out the last corner he was going into Turn 1, so it was a massive, massive gap, which almost seemed impossible.
"But I kept believing, kept pushing and doing some great laps, but it wasn't enough in the end."
Hamilton found himself in the reverse position to the one he occupied last time out at Shanghai - fighting a losing battle to chase down Vettel for victory, rather than controlling the race from the front while Vettel attempted to recover from early setbacks.
But Vettel's China misfortunes were not of his own making; on this occasion Hamilton felt he only had himself to blame.
"I feel pain in my heart," he added. "I lost two tenths from Turn 10 to 11 - the DRS didn't engage - in qualifying, I lost half a tenth out of the last corner, should have easily been on pole. Today, lost position at the start, solely my fault. Then you've got the time lost in the pitlane.
"You practice and practice and practice and practice and practice, and you only have 20 opportunities this year. And when you up, man, it's painful - there's no other way of saying it. I try to handle it the best way I can, but it eats you up a little bit inside and you've just got to try to cope and move forward.
"In Australia [where Vettel last beat Hamilton], I don't remember it being particularly any, necessarily, massive fault of my own - in the sense that I'd run out of tyres and had to pit; it was just the circumstances I was faced with.
"But today there were certain things, if perfect, I would've been in a much better position to fight for the win. And I didn't put myself in that position."
Even allowing for Hamilton's catalogue of woes, Mercedes could still have potentially salvaged victory with Bottas had the Finn not suffered a perplexing lack of pace after ditching that initial set of over-pressured super-soft Pirellis.
Apart from briefly challenging Vettel at the restart, Bottas struggled on his replacement set of super-softs, and again - in a way Hamilton did not - on the soft compound later on. Bottas eventually finished more than 20s behind Vettel in third.
Wolff said there were "not big differences in the set-up" between his two cars, but Bottas was convinced something was specifically wrong with his Mercedes, feeling the large pace deficit to Hamilton could not be blamed on inferior driving alone.
"Stint two and three, there is no explanation why the rear end wasn't working," Bottas said. "I was running out of all the tools, with the diff and with the brake bias, trying to cure the oversteer, but there was no way.
"When the tyres were new, they were OK, but very quickly when you rise up with the surface temperatures it gets more and more tricky.
"A strange race for me missing so much pace. It's not so easy for me to explain. I don't know why the pace was so poor. I know that gap doesn't just come from driving. I'm sure we'll find out something why I struggled more than Lewis."
Hamilton struggled much less, clearly, and also benefited from what turned out to be the superior strategy of not running the super-soft tyre again after his first stint, but admitted his own first stint on super-softs was also "not spectacular".
It seems the Mercedes isn't working the softest compounds particularly well at present, within what most paddock insiders feel is a narrower operating window of temperatures for the new control Pirellis than was the case last season.
This also played a part in Mercedes' defeat in Bahrain, allowing Vettel a free pass to attack Bottas during the first stint while Hamilton battled to fend off the Red Bulls.
"The car is obviously good, it's just how we use our tyres on race day, particularly when it gets a bit warmer," Hamilton explained. "But even today it wasn't really that. It was quite cool, so that is definitely a big question mark for us."
Mercedes clearly enjoys an advantage in single-lap pace. That has been evident through each of the first three grands prix of 2017, and was even more apparent in Bahrain than elsewhere. But although the W08 seems to lack the Ferrari's present finesse with the tyres in race trim, it should still have got at least one of its cars to flag first.
But ultimately, the quicker Mercedes driver qualified second unexpectedly; the polesitting Mercedes driver suffered a tyre pressure malfunction that spoiled his chances and backed his team-mate into the pack; the quicker Mercedes driver lost crucial track position at the start; he made a costly mistake at his first pitstop for which he was penalised; both initial pitstops were spoiled by taking place back-to-back under safety car conditions; the pitstops themselves were compromised by faulty equipment; the slower Mercedes driver then held up the quicker one for too long in the second stint - struggling with undiagnosed handling problems while management agonised over team orders.
And all of this took place in a context where the Mercedes again displayed some vulnerability relative to Ferrari in race conditions on the softest available tyre compound.
These are all small details, but this fresh battle between two Formula 1 titans is close enough that such details now matter an awful lot. And ultimately, eight of those crucial details conspired to help hand Ferrari a valuable victory at Mercedes' expense in Bahrain.
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Originally Posted by jgonzalesm6
FERRARI FOR EVER !!!!!!!
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