How Ferrari threw away another golden victory chance

The mood in Ferrari's camp after Friday practice at Suzuka was somewhat downbeat.

Having finished 0.356 seconds off the pace, in a session that doubled up as a back-up for qualifying due to Typhoon Hagibis forcing cancellation of the Japanese Grand Prix's Saturday running, Charles Leclerc declared Ferrari to be lacking grip.

The team's form man since the August summer break declared his deficit to the Mercedes on Friday was "more or less the real picture of the weekend".

Except it turned out to be far from the real picture. Yes, Mercedes ultimately won the race - the team's 12th victory in 17 GPs - thanks to Valtteri Bottas nailing the start and Sebastian Vettel fluffing his, but that result misrepresents the true picture of Sunday in Japan.

Ferrari turned Friday's form on its head to lock out the front row of the grid in Sunday morning's rescheduled qualifying session.

Vettel took his first pole since Canada, and the Scuderia should have converted that into a 1-2 result in the race, but conspired to throw victory away for the second grand prix in succession.

This time it was a confluence of mistakes that were to blame - individual lapses in judgement the reasons for Ferrari's capitulation to Mercedes, rather than any misguided stage management of proceedings from the pitwall, or any simmering tension between the drivers causing pre-race agreements to be disrespected.

Mistake number one came from Vettel, who blew his pole position advantage immediately by moving before the start lights went out. He managed to stop again before the sequence finished, but was then slow away and immediately overtaken around his outside by Bottas.

"I was doing what I normally do," said Vettel, who refuted a suggestion his foot had slipped off the brake but admitted to an error he wouldn't specify.

"I had a very poor start because I moved a little bit, stopped, then lost all the momentum. So, overall I lost compared to a normal start.

"It was a mistake. There was a reason, but not a great reason."

The fact Vettel got away with a jumped start without being penalised by the FIA raised an important question about how F1's rules are being interpreted and applied - and caused Lewis Hamilton to mock Vettel for "lying" in the post-race press conference when Vettel tried to insist there was nothing wrong with how things played out.

The FIA said Vettel's movement was "within the acceptable tolerance of the jumped start system", and although moving before the lights go out usually automatically carries a penalty (as Kimi Raikkonen received in Russia), the transponder system implemented to prevent a repeat of Bottas's lightning-fast anticipation of the lights going out in Austria in 2017 ultimately saved Vettel's bacon.

"Normally you need to anticipate those things and I didn't. I'm the one to blame" Charles Leclerc

This allowed Vettel to salvage second from this race - much to the chagrin of Hamilton, more of which we'll come to later - and prevented Ferrari suffering an even worse day.

That's because the other Ferrari had a disastrous race. Having been Ferrari's pacesetter coming into Suzuka, Leclerc lost his way a bit here. His nine-race streak of beating Vettel in qualifying was finally broken, as Leclerc struggled to nail the chicane, and he made two significant blunders before the race was even two corners old.

First, the start. "I got a little bit distracted," Leclerc admitted. "I saw Seb moving a little bit and then my reaction time was very poor. The start [itself] was not so bad but the reaction was very poor."

Shortly after, Leclerc piled into Max Verstappen's Red Bull-Honda as Verstappen attempted to drive around the Ferrari's outside at Turn 2.

It was a risky move, yes, but the Red Bull was fractionally ahead as they turned in, and there was clearly space enough for both cars to make it through the corner - except Leclerc understeered into the Red Bull and knocked Verstappen off the circuit, in a move Max called "irresponsible".

"With Max I just did a mistake, clearly," Leclerc added. "I was on the inside and being behind Seb and Lewis I lost the front [end grip] a little bit.

"Normally you need to anticipate those things and I didn't. I'm the one to blame."

This was not Leclerc's finest hour, but good on him for owning up to his mistakes so openly. Such humility is admirable from a young driver refining his craft in such a pressure-cooker environment.

The stewards initially elected to chalk the incident up to unintentional first-lap shenanigans, prompting Verstappen to furiously complain: "He just understeered into my car!". Upon reviewing further TV angles, the stewards eventually reconsidered and decided to launch a post-race investigation.

Verstappen's race lasted only 14 laps before Red Bull elected to retire his car because of damage that cost "20-25% of the downforce of the car", according to team boss Christian Horner.

Leclerc continued in third place, but with a deranged left-side front wing endplate that eventually detached itself on the run to the final chicane at the end of lap two. It damaged Leclerc's left-side mirror as it went, and then obliterated Hamilton's right-side mirror in an explosion of carbonfibre.

Hamilton rightly called this situation "dangerous", and it turned out the FIA agreed. Ferrari ignored an initial edict to bring Leclerc in before the endplate detached, and in fact Leclerc waited until the end of lap three before heading to the pits for a new front wing and medium tyres.

This also hurt the race of McLaren's Lando Norris, prompting an angry reaction from team principal Andreas Seidl.

"We obviously strongly disagree with competitors leaving cars out on track with entire front wing endplates hanging down, putting everyone at risk," he said.

"Unfortunately when this endplate then exploded, we caught debris in our front right brake duct. Brake temperature went through the roof so we had to box him [Norris] to clean it. And then the race was over.

"We will definitely speak to the race director after this race, just to understand what the general view is on that.

"Our view is pretty clear: if a part of that size and that material is hanging off the car, there should be no tolerance in being allowed to go flat out."

Leclerc dropped to the back of the field after his early stop. Although he recovered to finish sixth on the road (despite also losing his wonky left mirror for good measure having tried desperately to hold it in place with his hand) a five-second penalty for the clash with Verstappen, coupled with a 10s penalty for driving his car in an unsafe condition following that incident, meant Leclerc dropped to seventh behind Daniel Ricciardo's Renault in the result. We now await the outcome of Racing Point's post-race protest at how Renault is allegedly managing its cars' brake bias systems to see if that changes again.

Leclerc's race unravelling so spectacularly meant he was unable to provide any support to Ferrari's remaining car in the battle with Mercedes at the front.

Regardless, Vettel was unable to rediscover that sparkling qualifying pace in the race, so struggled to put Bottas under any kind of serious pressure.

Vettel lost around four tenths per lap to the leading Mercedes across the first 15 laps, before diving into the pits for a fresh set of softs at the end of lap 16 of 52 (one lap less than scheduled thanks to a 'system error' with the chequered flag lighting), committing Ferrari to a two-stop strategy.

Mercedes reacted by bringing Bottas in at the end of the following lap and fitting medium-compound tyres. This allowed Bottas to protect his lead and potentially hedge his bets between one or two stops later in the race, depending on tyre degradation.

As it turned out, Vettel's Ferrari was burning through its tyres far too aggressively, so Bottas comfortably maintained a 10-12s advantage through Vettel's second stint.

"You could see I was dropping off in terms of pace so the two-stop became more appealing than the one-stop," Vettel said. "I didn't have the pace at the end of the stint compared to Mercedes."

There are several theories as to why Ferrari's pace swings so drastically from day to day. There is a definite feeling Ferrari's straightline speed advantage has grown since the introduction of its 'spec 3' engine at Spa at the start of September and the Singapore upgrades a few weeks later have helped close the gap to Mercedes in the downforce department, but there is still work to be done.

Team boss Mattia Binotto revealed Ferrari made wing adjustments for Sunday morning's qualifying session at Suzuka, which brought the car to life over a single lap but perhaps compromised its ability to use the tyres well over a race distance - something that Ferrari also struggled with over the longer runs in Friday practice.

"We had some car issues on Friday; quite high degradation," Binotto explained. "And we worked through the set-up for quali and the race.

"We dropped the rear wing for quali and the race, which helped the front balance, and the car today felt better.

"We've got the right pace in quali but not in the race. We've got degradation, higher at least to our competitors.

"How it was compared to Friday is difficult to judge. We just simply tried to address the issues we had on Friday and the car improved.

"They [Mercedes] had a better pace to us in the race. Seb was ahead of Hamilton at the end of the first lap and then remained ahead at the end of the race. Even if you've got a good pace it's always difficult to overtake.

"If you would have been 1-2 at the start it would have been difficult to overtake two cars instead of only one. But I don't think that's something that's important, honestly.

"We need to review what was wrong, why we did some mistakes, why the pace was not good enough. At the end, we need to simply be the best on pace."

The "best on pace" ultimately in the Japanese GP was Hamilton. His 19-lap middle stint on the medium tyre was half a second per lap faster than the equivalent 17-lap effort from Bottas - struggling with traffic - on the same compound.

"Today could have been done better" Lewis Hamilton

Even over the comparative four laps Hamilton did on worn mediums compared to Bottas on fresh softs, just before Hamilton made his own second stop on lap 42, Hamilton was only a tenth and a half per lap slower. His fastest lap of the race was over six tenths clear of the next best, and almost a second faster than Bottas.

Hamilton was so fast once unleashed from behind Vettel's Ferrari that Bottas was genuinely concerned his team-mate would make it to the end without stopping again and steal victory away.

Hamilton felt Mercedes should have given him "better guidance" on how to manage his pace through that second stint. Stopping again condemned Hamilton to third, behind Vettel, and the championship leader pointedly suggested Mercedes could easily have scored a 1-2 finish had it managed the race differently.

"What's done is done - naturally we'll go and sit and talk to the engineers and strategists," said Hamilton, who finished a whopping 45.7s clear of the remaining Red Bull-Honda of Alex Albon. "Today could have been done better.

"There are multiple scenarios during the year when that's been the case but nonetheless, Valtteri did the job.

"I'd have had to have driven differently in that second stint, stretch out as far as you can... naturally when I was in the lead I thought about staying out, but by [that] time I'd already pushed so much to close the gap to Seb.

"We should have at least got a 1-2 today, but I think the strategy wasn't optimum for me.

"We can do better as a team, to make sure we score more 1-2s."

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff said Hamilton was "a bit stuck between a rock and a hard place" given that tweaking his strategy to get ahead of Vettel could have inadvertently hurt Bottas, such was Hamilton's pace.

And although Mercedes considered allowing Hamilton to one-stop before asking him to hand position back to Bottas, the team decided the safer bet was to keep Hamilton on a two-stopper.

"There were lots of tricky calls in this race," Wolff said. "We protected the lead with Valtteri and we took the pace out of his race once Sebastian pitted for his second stop.

"It was always clear it would always go towards Valtteri, we are not playing team-mates against each other with strategy. But then you could say we could have [assured] second place [by doing something different].

"Pitting Lewis again at the end again was a 50/50 call. We could have left him out and tried to ask the drivers to change position to give the result back, and maybe protected against Sebastian. But on the other side, maybe not protected against Sebastian.

"So, pitting and giving him [Hamilton] a new set of tyres felt like the right decision."

Hamilton's frustration was understandable, in that he clearly felt - and demonstrated - he had the pace to win, but needed some help to do so that was naturally not forthcoming given the current rules of engagement at Mercedes.

To at least turn this 1-3 result into a 1-2, Mercedes would have had to ask Hamilton to hand victory back to Bottas by moving aside late-on, perhaps something the team is not quite ready to tell its soon-to-be six-time world champion to do without fear he would just ignore the instruction. Champions are a ruthless breed after all...

That said, Mercedes has now beaten its own driver to the punch by clinching that record sixth consecutive championship in a row, while Hamilton must wait at least one more race to put the seal on his.

Mercedes has done the deed thanks to two consecutive race victories stolen against the run of play. Ferrari is clearly back in the game in terms of speed, but still has many wrinkles to iron out before it can claim to be ready to properly threaten the silver hegemony.