Why Ferrari doubt any strategy would have got Sainz the points they needed · RaceFans

While Charles Leclerc delivered a second place he was never likely to better as long as Max Verstappen finished, Ferrari’s hopes of beating Mercedes to second place in the constructors’ championship rested on their other driver.

Carlos Sainz Jnr qualified a lowly 16th, but given Ferrari’s form in recent races, surely an eighth place finish should have been possible for him?

Sainz was running only one place higher than he started when a suspected power unit problem forced him to retire on the penultimate lap. What went wrong with his race up to that point?

With the soft tyre compound too fragile to take any distance at Yas Marina, most drivers favoured the medium rubber to start on, to minimise the risk of losing places on the long straights at the start. Ferrari were content to bide their time with Sainz, however, and start him on hards. This appeared to be paying off as the drivers ahead of him started to pit and, by lap 18, he was up to third.

But Sainz was losing too much time. He had been less happy with his car’s balance than his team mate all weekend. He crashed in practice and was eliminated in Q1. During the race, running in the turbulence of other cars exacerbated their tyre degradation, a problem Ferrari has grappled with all season.

On lap 18 Sainz was almost two-and-a-half seconds slower than George Russell, who had swapped his medium compound tyres for a fresh set of hards. In order to get Sainz to the end of the race with only a single further pit stop he would have to switch to mediums, and he was nowhere near close enough to the end of the race for that to be an option.

That left Ferrari with only one course of action, as team principal Frederic Vasseur explained. “When you have to pit on lap 20 you have no other option but to put a second set of hard,” he said. “Because if you put mediums on you have to pit lap 30.”

As the rules require drivers to use two different tyre compounds, Sainz was in the same position Oscar Piastri found himself in Las Vegas a week earlier. He had to make a final, second pit stop for a different compound. Ferrari were left hoping some kind of neutralisation in the running order would play into their hands.

“The option was to put hards [then] hards and to expect that we would have a Safety Car or a red flag,” said Vasseur.

With the race running green until the end, Sainz slipped to the lower reaches of the points. He clung on until the end before…