Slick tyre gamble at Sepang costs McLaren and Ferrari in Bahrain GP restart

Ferrari and McLaren paid a heavy price for starting the Bahrain Grand Prix on slick tyres after the race finally got underway at Sepang following a one-hour, 33-minute delay, with intermediate runners immediately pulling clear on a circuit that had not dried as expected.

Ferrari lined up on the soft compound while McLaren opted for mediums, both teams convinced by the apparent state of the track. The moment the field rolled away behind the safety car, it became clear the surface was still too slippery for dry rubber. McLaren moved quickly to limit the damage, pulling Oscar Piastri into the pits before the standing start to fit intermediates — a call that proved correct. Lando Norris, Charles Leclerc, and Lewis Hamilton were not so fortunate, left stranded as the intermediate runners surged past.

Leclerc peeled into the pitlane at the end of the opening lap, while Hamilton and Norris reasoned that stopping again would only compound the time already lost. Hamilton, when asked by Ferrari whether to pit a second time, concluded the team was already so far back that another stop made little sense.

By lap eight, slick lap times had equalised with those on intermediates, and a subsequent off from Valtteri Bottas triggered a safety car that gave the remaining slick runners their opportunity to switch.

Norris was candid in his post-race assessment, explaining that conditions on his reconnaissance lap had actually undermined his confidence in the intermediate. The Briton reported his green-walled tyre was already shredded after a single lap of Sepang’s abrasive surface, which made the slick option appear more viable than it turned out to be.

“It felt maybe a little bit of a risk, because a slick on a wet track is always a bit of a risk,” Norris said. “There was enough people on it that it was quite convincing at the time that it was possibly going to be the right decision.”

“The laps to the grid on the inter when it was a similar kind of condition, they had so much grip and my inter was completely shredded after one lap. I was convinced a slick tyre would work, but I think it was just the fact I’ve never really been on the inter before. Things just felt a lot better than they should have done in a way.”

Norris acknowledged that Piastri made the right call by pitting early, and accepted the error without deflection. “Oscar probably made the right decision in boxing and we got it wrong today, that’s all,” he said.

The episode illustrated the fine margins of wet-weather tyre strategy, where a single reconnaissance lap’s worth of data — and the collective behaviour of rivals — can tip a team toward a decision that unravels within moments of the race beginning.