Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivabene has revealed that Kimi Raikkonen's switch to a two-stop strategy at the Mexican Grand Prix came after the Finn complained that his medium tyres were gone.
While most of the front-runners, including Raikkonen’s team-mate Sebastian Vettel, pitted only once in last Sunday’s 71-lap contest, the 2007 world champion stopped again to take a set of used mediums, which dropped him from fifth to seventh.
When asked why Raikkonen made that extra pit stop, Arrivabene replied: “Because he asked for it.
“He said the tyres were gone and our strategy with Kimi was equal to the one of Seb, but he was asking and complaining about the tyre status and then we changed immediately the strategy and pitted him.
“Sometimes if the driver is not really convinced about the behaviour of the tyre, the best way to do it is to re-do their strategy and we had a plan-B to call him in, calm him down and send him out.”
Raikkonen reveals that the rationale behind the strategy switch was also to force Red Bull’s hand and pit third-placed Max Verstappen again.
“I think we could have run quite a bit longer with the first set [of softs] but saying that afterwards it’s always easy,” the Finn said. “Once we put the medium tyres on the grip was quite poor overall.
“It wasn’t a disaster but they had quite poor grip. It was the first time I ran them this weekend, I’m sure they would have lasted the distance but I was hoping the next set would be a lot better.
“But it was pretty much the same – we tried to do something and if any good came out of it, it was that we pushed Red Bull to make a second stop too, as we were trying to beat Ricciardo and that helped Seb’s race a bit.”
Raikkonen eventually recovered to sixth place by the flag after overtaking Force India’s Nico Hulkenberg.
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