Ferrari fight back at Sepang as Leclerc hopes result silences "silly rumours"
"Everything that could have gone wrong in the first part of the race went wrong," Charles Leclerc said after the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia. "Everything that could have gone right, though, in the second part of the race went right for us."
That swing gave Ferrari its first podium in five rounds. Lewis Hamilton finished third, 4.919 seconds behind race winner Max Verstappen, and Leclerc took fourth, 7.258 seconds back. Together they scored 27 points, and they did it in a week when the team's lack of podiums had fed talk about Fred Vasseur's future. Ferrari called an unusual media briefing on Tuesday to express its full confidence in its team principal.
Sunday gave Ferrari every reason to expect more of the same. Both cars started on slick tyres in wet conditions and dropped towards the back. Hamilton's Ferrari had also lost power on the formation lap before the team reset its software. Leclerc's afternoon got worse with a puncture and a broken front wing.
Hamilton had started second, and he was mixed about what followed. "I think it's bittersweet," he said. "I think we had an opportunity and ultimately didn't maximise in it, obviously, at the beginning." Once the race got going, he said, "I managed to keep it on track, which I'm telling you was so, so hard, so easy to have crashed on those slick tyres."
He held out "for as long as I could" until the track dried, then "just kept it going". Hamilton credited "good calls and a strategy of when to pit" for getting him back up the order, and he moved into third by passing Isack Hadjar late on. "So I'm very, very grateful for that and very happy with it," he said.
He rated it "definitely one of the better ones" among his weekends in red, and handed much of the credit to the garage after Saturday. "I think we did a really good job yesterday," Hamilton said. "The engineers did a great job, the mechanics did a great job with changing and fixing the car, getting the car where it needed to be."
He still had one eye on the details. "We often talk about execution. I think yesterday we executed really well and I think we'll go back to the drawing board and look and see how we could have done better today. And we'll try and take this performance on to next week [in Singapore]."
Leclerc was more reserved about the car. "I didn't have a good feeling with the car, had quite a lot of inconsistencies and just struggled to use the maximum potential of the car," he explained. After the slick tyres, the puncture and the damage, it became a matter of "just trying to save what we could save". He could not see a better outcome from it.
"I'm not sure how much more we could have done in terms of position with a completely smooth race, to be honest," he said, calling P4 "a good result considering the first part of the race" and "a very stable result for the team as well".
He said Ferrari still has work to do. "There are plenty of things we need to learn from and do better next time we find ourselves in these conditions," Leclerc said.
He saved his strongest words for the rumours around the team. "I'm happy that we have a good race here," Leclerc said. "And hopefully that stops a little bit the silly rumours that there are around the team. I mean, it's, yeah, Fred is doing absolutely everything in order to bring back the team to the top. And we are all doing that."
The headlines had clearly taken a toll. "To see all of these headlines in the last few days hasn't been nice at all," he said. "So we are very united, and that's the most important. And I just hope we are back on the top step of the podium as soon as possible."
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