09/04/2018
NEWS STORY
Reflecting on a race his team should have won by pressing home its advantage at a time Sebastian Vettel was clearly hurting, Toto Wolff admits that 'would of, should of' doesn't count and that the German driver played a blinder.
"We realised pretty early that the medium was a good tyre," says the Austrian. "We saw that with Alonso and decided to try it, to see how it would be on our cars with the option of stopping twice.
"Valtteri immediately had very good pace. So it was clear that he would make it to the end on the medium but there was still a chance that Ferrari would do the same.
"They were taking big risks because at the end Vettel's car was probably two seconds slower than Valtteri, so if it would have been one or two laps later he would have lost the race.
"But 'would be' is not what counts," he admits. "What counts is the race result and Sebastian and Ferrari won it, and it was well deserved. They adapted to the situation.
"After coming out on the mediums behind Sebastian and with a gap that we were able to close down, knowing that they needed to either stop again or would run out of tyre, this was the moment where I would say the 90% probability was on us winning. And we lost that.
"They hurt," he admitted, when asked about the lost points. "The points that you don't make are the ones that could decide the championship. In the drivers' championship, Lewis lost seven points in Melbourne. I don't think that he would have been much better than P3 in Bahrain because it was a lot between Valtteri and Sebastian. For a race win he was too far away.
"In the constructors' we lost seven in Melbourne and we lost seven in Bahrain, so 14 points. That can make the difference in the end.
"It will be very close this season and it will swing from track to track and from how well prepared you are or not."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Bahrain, here.