World Championships are won by picking up points on days when things don’t quite go right, and Fernando Alonso’s fourth place in Australia may prove to be very valuable as the season progresses.
The man himself noted that you can win a race and gain only seven points on a rival, whereas this time he gained 12 on Sebastian Vettel. For Ferrari team boss Stefano Domenicali, the result was certainly a relief.
“We need to go home very happy with the result of today, considering the situation that after the start we had one car on the gravel bed,” he said after the flag. “Felipe also had a little bit of a difficult weekend to have the right temperatures on the tyres to give the grip that we wanted.
“Having third and fourth places, and considering that the car that had two pole positions had two problems, we take on board all the points and I think that we can be really happy.
“To be honest with you at the first corner I thought, ‘One less’, and then let’s see what is going to happen. Considering the race of today, every corner we were there touching wood, as you say in English. It was really an incredible race, with the doubts of the strategy, with the doubts of the weather, with the doubts of the consistency of the tyres, and the fact that we knew we took a risk with doing just one stop. So a lot of things, and that’s the reason we are very happy.”
Domenicali said the decision not to stop for a second set of dry tyres was not an easy one. “We did some consideration on that to be honest, but considering the way the times were progressing we thought maybe we can take the risk of not doing a stop, and then after two or three laps then it was too late to change and defend the position, because otherwise we would have lost many more positions.”
Asked by this blog whether he enjoyed seeing the two Ferraris racing each other – as they did for much of the Australian race and rather forcibly at Turn One in Bahrain – Stefano said: “It’s like Hamilton and Button, I saw them side-by-side. Everyone has two cars – unless some teams want to drive with one car – and you have two good drivers, I think that has to be the nature of F1.”
Intriguingly Domenicali also admitted that the drivers were not allowed to race in the ‘final stint.’
“Not in the final stint, during the final stint we have let’s say an internal code of practice that unless there is an obvious situation, the [order] has to be respected. Otherwise you can attack, absolutely.”
It’s not clear when that call came into effect, given that strategies now call for a fewer stops. Indeed they both ran 49 laps from their single tyre stop to the flag…
Adam Cooper F1 
Nothing wrong with a 3-4 at all. Last year it took Ferrari four Grands Prix to score a point. Nice job by both drivers extracting the maximum that could be achieved under the circumstances.
I would suggest that the team principal was referring to the latter part of the race when the order had settled down to the finishing order, after the other cars had pitted. Obviously they don’t want to have any banzai moves that could cause an incident. Massa let Alonso have the position in Bahrain while he defended against the opposition at the start. In Australia it was the other way around. That’s how you take a constructor’s title, instead of blowing it.