SEPANG — Charles Leclerc salvaged fourth place at the Bahrain Grand Prix after Ferrari's slick tire gamble backfired at the start and left both cars outside the points. Leclerc and teammate Lewis Hamilton plummeted down the order as intermediate runners broke away at the front, forcing Leclerc to pit at the end of Lap 3 to switch to intermediate tires and drop to the back of the field before a Safety Car on Lap 6 neutralized the race and brought him back into contention. He fought through the field from there to take the checkered flag in fourth, one spot behind Hamilton in third, with Kimi and Max ahead.
“We were where we kind of would have hoped to finish,” Leclerc explained after the Grand Prix. “Kimi and Max were just too strong for us today. And we were right after, and we finished P3, P4, but a bit of a strange race. I think everything that could have gone wrong at the first part of the race went wrong, and everything that could have gone right in the second part of the race went right. So, at the end of the day, kind of balanced, both extremes balanced each other out, and we are finishing where we should have finished. But it's been a bit more of a sweaty race than what I would have hoped.”
Leclerc was asked whether Ferrari made the wrong call by putting both drivers on slick tires and whether the team should have split the strategy given the conditions. He said he was aligned with the team and that the decision was a close call. “I was aligned with the team. I think it was a close call, as it always is in these conditions,” Leclerc said. “And, yeah, we'll speak whether to split the cars in those conditions is the best possible way, but it's also true that when you split the cars, by definition, there's one very wrong choice and one very good choice. And it's very difficult to have an in-between scenario where both scenarios kind of pan out the same. So, we thought we were doing the right thing, obviously, but clearly, there's one team in particular, and that is Red Bull, that gets it right most of the time with both cars, and for that, we need to understand what they are doing better than we do.”
Ferrari recovered to secure a double points finish after the early setback, with both cars on the correct strategy following the Safety Car period. The recovery followed a difficult opening phase where the slick tire start had threatened to ruin the race, a gamble that also hurt rivals at Sepang as detailed in Slick Tyre Gamble Hurts McLaren and Ferrari at Sepang.