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How Vettel stole Hamilton's thunderDid Mercedes throw the Malaysian Grand Prix away with poor tactics, or were Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari always destined to win? BEN ANDERSON unravels the race Sebastian Vettel has split the Mercedes drivers by qualifying on the front row for each of the last two Malaysian Grands Prix. Last year - as a Red Bull racer - he inevitably slipped back to third as Lewis Hamilton drove off into the distance.
Vettel repeated his qualifying trick as a Ferrari man in 2015, but again no one expected him to win. We all thought he might - if he got everything right - give the Mercedes drivers something to worry about, and - maybe - finish second.
It is clear Ferrari has made a massive step over the winter under the blossoming technical directorship of James Allison, but not the sort of step that puts the Scuderia on a par with Mercedes. Best-of-the-rest maybe, but winning potential so early in the season? Forget it.
Although Vettel came within a tenth of a second of snatching pole from Hamilton in the wet on Saturday, Mercedes still had a clear pace advantage in the dry - and Hamilton did actually secure pole. The race looked Hamilton's and Mercedes' to lose.
And lose it they did. Or did they? Would Ferrari have won this race regardless of an early safety car intervention to retrieve Marcus Ericsson's overly ambitious Sauber?
Would Mercedes have beaten Ferrari if it had not elected to pit both its drivers under that safety car and switch to the (slower) harder tyre?
Or was Ferrari and its new star signing simply so good at managing their Pirelli rubber as to render Vettel's 40th career victory a mere formality?
Everything we saw during Friday practice suggested Ferrari had the edge over Mercedes on longer runs. Kimi Raikkonen managed to lap on average a tenth faster than Hamilton and three tenths quicker than Nico Rosberg per lap over comparable stints on the medium tyre.
Vettel did his longer running on the hard tyre, and perhaps this fact is crucial. By not splitting their Friday strategies in the searing 56-degrees Celsius heat, perhaps Mercedes lacked crucial knowledge of the harder rubber heading into race day, where track temperatures soared as high as 62C.
Things started routinely enough, with Hamilton leading the race away from pole while Vettel braked deep into Turn 1 to fend off Rosberg.
Vettel remained within a second of Hamilton over the first three laps, before the safety car came out. Mercedes took this opportunity to pit both its drivers, stacking Hamilton and Rosberg one behind the other and switching them both onto the harder tyre.
This seemed a strange move so early in the race, given the harder tyre is slower and (although Mercedes didn't complete long runs with it on Friday) didn't appear to be particularly more durable than the medium.
When you add in the fact both Hamilton and Rosberg then had to slice their way through traffic after the restart, to get back on terms with Vettel, choosing the harder tyre for this task seemed even stranger.
Perhaps - knowing it couldn't match Ferrari on the medium - Mercedes simply gambled on the hard balancing out what team chief Toto Wolff later described as an "aggressive" set-up.
But in doing this Hamilton lost the advantage of track position over Vettel. Hamilton rejoined sixth, but it took him four laps to clear the slower cars and get back into clean air.
In total, he lost 4.115s during this sequence. Vettel's exuberant weaving at the finish means the end-of-race gap is best judged from the penultimate lap mark of 10.094s. Hand that traffic loss back to Hamilton under a normal racing scenario and he still winds up 5.979s behind Vettel in the final deficit, so safety car strategy is not enough to explain his defeat.
Perhaps Mercedes simply underestimated how fast and consistent Vettel's Ferrari would be in race rim. After all, the SF15-T was designed under the influence of Allison, who produced cars for Lotus that allowed it to score top results by often stopping fewer times than rivals.
Vettel's 17-lap first stint on used mediums pretty much matched Hamilton's equivalent early stint on new hards for pace - once Hamilton was in clear air. Hamilton was 9.995s adrift of Vettel once he'd finally cleared the queue on lap 10, and Vettel was still 8.791s clear of Hamilton before he made his own first stop on lap 17.
Mercedes probably expected Hamilton to be quicker on new hard tyres than Vettel was on old mediums, but it simply didn't work out that way.
"We were not expecting them [Ferrari] to be as quick as they were today," conceded Hamilton, who said he spent the race "do everything I could" with the controls to combat understeer in his W06. "I don't know whether if I stayed out with him that would have made much of a difference.
"They were probably just as good if not a little better in terms of tyre deg, so it would have been very close. After the first stop I just had so much ground to catch up, it was pretty much impossible."
It looks as though Mercedes could not have completed this race on two stops under any circumstances, so was already at a strategic disadvantage given Ferrari came into Sunday with what team principal Maurizio Arrivabene described as a "clear" plan.
Mercedes told its driver they'd have to overtake Vettel, but it was the Ferrari doing the passing LAT
Hamilton's third stint on new medium tyres only lasted 14 laps before he headed back to the pits, and his pace dropped off significantly after 10 of those.
Vettel managed an equivalent stint (slightly earlier in the race and thus with more fuel on board) of 20 laps, with the last 12 of those all comparable to Hamilton's final four but with a heavier car. If you compare their final stints on the harder tyre, Vettel managed 19 laps, Hamilton 18. Hamilton gained 4.4s on Vettel across the balance of that final stint. Still not enough to overturn the final result.
In short, even if Mercedes hadn't pitted Hamilton under the safety car, he would likely still have finished behind Vettel, despite having the advantage of track position. In fact, even if the race had run normally (ie: without a safety car) Vettel would have been quick enough - and his Ferrari kind enough on its tyres - to overturn Hamilton's early advantage.
The flexibility Ferrari's superior tyre management gave Vettel meant even if Hamilton had completed two 'normal' stints on mediums in the early part of the race, Vettel would still have overtaken him in the pits eventually - just much later than he actually did. The race would have been closer, but ultimately - as Toto Wolff conceded afterwards - the Ferrari was just a bit too good in these conditions.
"Remember last year we were struggling against Vettel in the race and one of the explanations is the extremely high ambient and Tarmac temperatures that [meant] probably we have gone a bit too aggressive on set-ups and that pushed us into a direction of three stops," he explained. "Then we were stuck in traffic after pitstops, we damaged the tyres following cars, and you are not able to catch up any more.
"We need to find out why we were struggling for long-run pace in these hot conditions because I think that is the main point to look at. In terms of long-run pace, we were not the fastest car today."
But Mercedes still had the fastest car over a single lap, which suggests perhaps it should have left Hamilton out under the safety car. From there he could have at least enjoyed the advantage of superior track position for longer - perhaps backing Vettel into the pack as the tyres went off?
The point is Mercedes - whether it felt backed into a corner or not - could have made Ferrari work harder than it had to for its first victory since the 2013 Spanish GP. Certainly Vettel suggested after the race that Mercedes had given Ferrari a helping hand by pitting so soon.
"When they pulled in, I think we were a bit surprised," he said. "We saw on Friday they weren't too happy on the medium compound, [but] they probably struggled a bit with the heat more than expected.
"We didn't struggle as much as we probably expected. Both things made us competitive and able to beat them fair and square. But they are the ones who usually set the pace. Today we capitalised on their weakness a bit."
But the events of this race suggest tyre management in hot conditions is not the only potential weakness in the Mercedes package. Those questionable strategic calls made its race more difficult than it needed to be, and led to some tense exchanges over the radio between the team and its drivers.
Hamilton for one couldn't understand why he'd been switched onto the hard tyre so early in the race, but Mercedes told him its calculations said it was the faster choice. Ultimately that looked like an error of judgment, but Wolff defended the call.
"Normally it [the harder tyre] is good - the more fuel you run, the harder the tyre [should be]. You have to put the prime [harder tyre] on once and it makes sense with a heavier car. What we have seen [in Malaysia] is a variant. We have seen an impressive run from Kimi and Sebastian with the option [medium] - more than 15 laps - and on the second option they did 20 laps, which we were unable to match.
"We put the option on Lewis to see what was possible in the third stint, and after lap 14 the pace dropped massively, so we were unable to put another option on at the end. It needed to be a prime because it was 23 or 24 laps to go."
Wolff was prepared to concede that Mercedes should have handled its radio communications better. Hamilton complained about being spoken to while driving through corners, while Rosberg felt his messages were too "conversational". There was also one incident where Mercedes miscommunicated a message intended for Rosberg to Hamilton instead.
"We weren't particularly good on radio messaging today; we had a couple of weird calls," Wolff admitted. "Lots of action on the radio internally is something we need to look at. I guess if you see you are not able to catch up, there is a certain frustration that grows on you."
It did look as though Mercedes cracked slightly under the pressure being applied by Ferrari. This could be a consequence of spending the past 12 months with the fastest car, mostly racing by itself.
It tried a different strategy on Rosberg's car (running two hard-tyre stints before switching to the medium again for the closing stages), which allowed the German to regain some of the ground he lost early on, but he could only finish third.
Mercedes told both its drivers at one stage that they were on course to beat Vettel, by overtaking him on track. That was never even close to happening. In fact, Vettel was the one who did the on-track overtaking - passing Hamilton just as the reigning world champion dived into the pits for his second stop on lap 24.
"It is always easy afterwards to regret and say in hindsight we could have done this or that better, but we are taking these decisions together," explained Wolff. "We haven't done any strategic mistakes in last two years and this is why it doesn't make sense to point the finger to a single event.
"There is no panic. We had a new situation that we haven't had for a while that we were not in control of things. Things didn't pan out the way we expected them to pan out. It is clear the winning streak is not going to go on forever. Today [we were] beaten fair and square."
After a dominant one-two finish in first race of the season in Australia, no one would have predicted Wolff uttering those words just two weeks later. The question now is whether Ferrari can maintain the form it showed here and make a real race of this world championship.
After the agony of defeat, success will be sweet!
WoW!! Seems like just yesterday!! 