F1 strategy expert pinpoints exactly what went wrong for Ferrari

Sky Sports F1 pundit and former Aston Martin strategist Bernie Collins has analysed what went wrong for Ferrari in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

Lewis Hamilton suffered a disappointing Ferrari debut at a wet opening round in Melbourne and could only finish 10th, two places behind teammate Charles Leclerc after a team strategy gamble backfired.

Seven-time F1 world champion Hamilton briefly led but an incorrect Ferrari strategy call to stay out on slick tyres as a heavy late shower hit resulted in him dropping down the field.

“The whole team will look at the race and see what was left on the table, and there was a lot left on the table I think,” Collins told the Sky Sports F1 podcast as she dissected where Ferrari’s race unraveled.

“Ferrari is really interesting. All the talk is that they put a wet set-up on the car. Well it was wet on Sunday, so the set-up should have been right, unless something went badly wrong with the set-up they chose.

“For me, I can see how it happens, on the pit wall you’ve just got onto dry tyres. The dry tyre decision was forced for most people because we had the Safety Car, so most people chose to change to dry tyres on the same lap.

“So that done and all they were deciding was between a medium and a hard. I think there’s questions there why people chose the hard - it didn’t seem like the logical choice but we didn’t really get to see it play out.

“Then there was the switch from dry back to inters. Now everyone is looking at the radar and seeing this small patch of rain, maybe one or two laps, and thinking ‘okay, this rain is coming but it’s only going to be one or two laps’.

“I can see how people are getting their heads into ‘it’s just one or two laps, then it’s going to be dry’. But what people had forgotten was that it had just taken 30 laps for the track to dry.

“So even if it was just a small amount of rain, the track was going to have to go through that drying process as well. And that’s what went wrong. People that thought ‘we’re just on these dry tyres, we’ll survive one or two laps’ and if it was just one or two laps and the track went back to dry, that would have been fine.

“But the track was never going to dry that quickly, with the track temperatures we were at, we’d just seen that for 30 laps.”

Ferrari not the only team to get it wrong

Collins believes other teams including Red Bull also made the wrong tyre calls, but were saved by Max Verstappen’s instinctive thinking.

“Two bits I picked up post-race which I thought was very interesting, was at the time, George Russell was one of the only drivers that I heard from Mercedes’ pit wall, where they said ‘we are definitely going to have to go to inter at some point’,” she explained.

“So not deciding if it’s an inter or not, it’s definitely an inter, it’s just the right lap. I didn’t hear that communication from many others. Even Red Bull got it wrong I think. They kept Lawson out because he didn’t argue it. But Verstappen was strong enough to say ‘we’re boxing’.

“So other teams got it wrong as well as Ferrari, it’s just that Ferrari followed through on it with both drivers, which is why they ended up in the position they were in.

“The other one I thought was very interesting was James Vowles post-race said that Carlos Sainz in the garage was very strong at saying ‘you need to switch to inters’. He’s looking at the big picture, he’s been in the car, and he is going ‘this is not drying’.

“Often we get very caught up in the numbers of saying ‘it’s one or two laps of inters, can you survive? That’s better than doing a pit stop. But it’s not. It’s the drying time, and that’s where I think they went wrong, Ferrari. There was a lot of angst on the radio - and that’s a learning curve as well.”