Autosportfoto

F1 Singapore GP: Ferrari insists strategy call didn’t cost Raikkonen podium

Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivbaene says he is sure Kimi Raikkonen was not denied a podium by the team's decision to respond to Mercedes' strategic call rather than let him race to the end of the Singapore Grand Prix.

Having started fifth, Raikkonen ran fourth for the first stint but would close onto the tail of an ailing Lewis Hamilton in the second stint before getting by when the Mercedes driver out-braked himself on lap 32.

As such, Mercedes chose to switch Hamilton onto a 'plan B' strategy that would see him make a third pit-stop for super-soft tyres, thus giving him a potential run at catching Raikkonen before the end of the race with faster rubber.

Instead, Ferrari responded by pitting Raikkonen as well the following lap, but Hamilton's excellent out-lap would see him get the jump on the Finn for a third position he'd hold to the end.

Raising speculation that Ferrari should have kept Raikkonen on his two-stop strategy, Arrivabene nonetheless contests that the team made the right call.

"To be 100 per cent sure, you have to look at the data. It was the right decision to take. If we were having huge degradation [on the soft tyres] and Mercedes were taking us, we would have been crazy. We took a decision looking at our data. The thing to do afterwards is verify if our data was right."

Zdroj: crash.net