Maurizio Arrivabene believes Ferrari could have been in the running for victory at the Bahrain Grand Prix had it not been for Kimi Raikkonen's finger slipping on the clutch paddle at the start.
Raikkonen finished second to Nico Rosberg in Bahrain while team-mate Sebastian Vettel had to retire with an engine issue, traced to either a valve or fuel injector failure, on the formation lap. After his finger slipped on the clutch paddle at the start, Raikkonen dropped to fifth on the first lap but after the third and final round of pit stops had managed to get the gap back to under four seconds to Rosberg.
"Concerning the race, we have two points of view," Arrivabene said. "One is that I am not happy at all, because I think with this strategy and looking at the performance of Kimi -- maybe because in the race things are not always certain -- but I think we were able to do a very, very good with Sebastian.
"Having said that, Kimi had a bit of a problem at the start and I think that penalised him quite a lot because he overtook three guys before him. Maybe, and I underline maybe, he compromised the victory of the race. If you count [the gap], it's easy and I'm not inventing anything."
However, closer analysis of the race lap times shows Raikkonen was gaining on each pit stop because he was pitting first while Mercedes was running a conservative strategy in case of a safety car. What's more, when Rosberg exited the pits after his final pit stop he set a 1:34.482, which was over 0.5s faster than anything Raikkonen could manage, suggesting Mercedes was merely managing the gap while Ferrari was pushing flatout.
"When you are in front in the race and you do your calculation as we do our calculation, it could be that he was quite confident and slowed down for fuel consumption or many other reasons" Arrivabene said of Rosberg. "At the end of the story when someone is winning races you have to just say congratulations and well done."
In qualifying the gap stood at over 0.5s too, but Arrivabene said Ferrari's objective had been to pressure Mercedes into turning its engine up to the max.
"In qualifying at the beginning of the Q3 when we made the first time we decided to go out again to measure how much Viagra they are taking! 250? 500? We discovered that it was 500, which is good because they need a lot! Seriously, we were quite confident during the qualifying that our goal was to push the maximum and evaluate our gap in between us and them."