Ferrari denies Raikkonen strategy was wrong

Maurizio Arrivabene has defended Ferrari’s decision to pit Kimi Raikkonen for a third time in order to cover Lewis Hamilton at the Singapore Grand Prix, though the Finn eventually slipped down from third to fourth.

Having lined up P5 on the grid, Raikkonen got past the slow-starting Red Bull of Max Verstappen at the start before shadowing the Mercedes driver in the first half of F1's night race.

The 2007 world champion then moved past Hamilton when the latter outbraked himself on Lap 32 . Attempting to regain third place, Mercedes devised an aggressive strategy that saw the Briton pit for a fresh set of supersofts with 17 laps remaining.

Ferrari immediately reacted to its rivals’ move and called Raikkonen one lap later to fit the same purple-marked rubber on his SF16-H. The move eventually did not pay off, with Hamilton able to make the undercut work and stay ahead of the Ferrari on a narrow and twisty track where overtaking is often difficult.

“To be 100 per cent sure, you have to look at the data,” Arrivabene said in response to suggestions that Ferrari’s call cost Raikkonen a spot on the podium.

“It was the right decision to take. If we were having huge degradation [on the soft compound] and Mercedes were taking us, we would have been crazy. We took a decision looking at our data. The thing to do afterwards is verify if our data was right.”

Asked for his opinion after the race, Raikkonen admitted he was unsure about his team’s strategy as the 36-year-old claimed that his set of softs could have lasted until the chequered flag.

2016 Singapore Grand Prix - Driver ratings

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