To compound the error on having Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc change places, believing the German had the pace to catch the Mercedes pair at a time the Monegasque was clearly struggling. The Maranello outfit then completely lost the plot in dithering over whether to run Leclerc on a one-stop strategy or two-stop.

"I don't think we had a faster car than Ferrari today," admitted Red Bull boss, Christian Horner, after Max Verstappen claimed fourth, "and so our best way of beating at least one of their cars was going on to the two stop.

"That sparked some discussion between Sebastian and his pit-wall as to whether or not they were going to stop at all," he added. "But in the end they covered Max, Mercedes had to cover him, and Leclerc got hung out to dry a little bit."

"It's a tricky situation," admitted Toto Wolff, "because you would like the quicker car hunting down your opponents and Sebastian said he had the quicker car at that stage and they reversed the order. I can understand that.

"Nevertheless, when you start doing these things it becomes very complicated and you start a precedent and open a can of worms. Then you might have to call at every race that the car behind can go quicker. So, it's not an easy situation and we have been there with Nico and Lewis and with Valtteri too.

"We had a situation today where they were pushing each other very hard and taking a risk to potentially not finish the race," said Wolff of his own two drivers, who were double-stacked for their second stop, a move that Bottas claims ended all hope of passing his teammate.

"It's not a Ferrari problem alone," admitted Wolff, "every team has that issue if you have two alpha drivers."

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READERS COMMENTS

1. Posted by Spindoctor, 16/04/2019 7:54

"Valteri seems a decent bloke, but he didn't lose to Lewis becuase of strategy. He wasn't as fast.
Once it was clear that Lewis could pull away at will, 'racing' Lewis was merely shortening both drivers' engine lives."

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2. Posted by Kkiirmki, 15/04/2019 22:26

"Aweful strategy from Ferrari. You would think this was their 1st GP, not their (nearly) 1000th."

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Wolff: Ferrari's China strategy "a can of worms"

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