Leclerc urges Ferrari to learn from Red Bull after costly Sepang tyre call

Ferrari’s slick-tyre call sent Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton down the order at the 2026 Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, held at Sepang. After the race, Leclerc urged Ferrari to study how Red Bull makes strategy calls for both cars. He said he had been aligned with Ferrari at the time and regarded the decision as a close call.

The race accounts describe the tyre sequence differently. Motorsport.com says both Ferraris started the mixed-weather race on softs; Leclerc fell from fourth to last place and Hamilton from second to 15th, with Leclerc pitting at the end of a damp first lap. RacingNews365 describes Ferrari choosing slicks for both cars at a restart after earlier chaos.

Motorsport.com also says Ferrari was one of six teams to start on slicks; it and Alpine were the only teams not to split their drivers’ tyre strategies.

Leclerc said Ferrari had some data, but it came from conditions unlike those in the race. The surface looked fairly dry, he said; the biggest unknown was how much water lay in the gaps in the tarmac. He said there was more water than most had expected, which made slicks the wrong decision in hindsight.

Leclerc said Ferrari would discuss whether to split its cars’ strategies in similar conditions. In his view, splitting the cars means one very wrong and one very good choice, and it is difficult to find a middle ground in which both strategies work out similarly. Red Bull gets such calls right with both cars most of the time, he said; Ferrari needs to understand what its rival does better.

Hamilton finished third and Leclerc fourth. Their recovery was helped by George Russell retiring with five laps to go after a power-unit failure. Leclerc said Ferrari’s final result was close to where the team had hoped to finish; Verstappen and Kimi Antonelli, he said, had been too strong.