Ferrari gamble and lose

Fernando Alonso ran an all-or-nothing strategy attempting to win the Canadian Grand Prix.

In the final analysis it failed to pay off. By switching from a two to a one stop strategy late in the day, Ferrari kept Alonso out, hoping he could stay ahead of the two-stopping Lewis Hamilton. Sebastian Vettel looked set on a similar gambit for Red Bull but seven laps from the end accepted it wasn’t going to work and cut his losses, coming in for another set of tyres. Alonso hung on and was passed by first Hamilton, then the more balanced one-stopping Romain Grosjean and Sergio Pérez, and finally the recovering Vettel.

“Today we tried to win the race, but the gamble of only making a single stop did not pay off,” said a philosophical Alonso after the race. “When Hamilton came back into the pits for his second stop, we chose to try and play our hand: now it’s easy to say that we should have made that choice too, but it would have meant we had tried nothing and we could also have lost position to Vettel. The last laps were very long indeed: the tyres dropped off suddenly and I was too slow to defend myself from those coming up behind. My engineer was telling me to hold them off but there was no way I could do it.

“The real problem today was the tyre degradation, definitely not the strategy, which at the very most cost us one place, but let’s not forget that it was that very same strategy that allowed to us to get ahead of Vettel at the first stop. For the first time this year, we have not just been trying to limit the damage, in that we were actually aiming for the win. It’s a positive sign and now we must confirm it at Valencia and Silverstone. We are definitely returning home with more confidence in our chances, because this was the most significant step forward we have made in terms of car development for a long time.”

Team principal Stefano Domenicali was equally phlegmatic: “There’s a certain feeling of disappointment this afternoon and there’s no point denying it. It’s the first weekend in which we have not got the most out of what we had, but it’s also down to the fact that the level of expectation was higher thanks to the progress we have made. Let’s not forget that yesterday we were fighting for pole and today, we were in the battle for the win right to the end: in Bahrain, a month and a half ago – not a year ago – we only got one driver into Q3 and we finished the race one minute off the winner.”

Alonso has now fallen two points behind new Drivers’ Championship leader Lewis Hamilton.