Vettel celebrating second win of the season

In Bahrain for the third round of the Formula One World Championship both Mercedes and Ferrari were evenly matched.

Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton had both claimed a first and a second place in the opening Grand Prix in Australia and China.

This time around the same two once again finished first and second and as it was in Australia, it was Ferrari standing upon the first step of the podium.

Mercedes had the one lap pace advantage over Ferrari with Valterri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton locking out the front row, but errors cost both drivers a chance at victory in the desert under the lights.

For Bottas, his tyre pressures weren’t set up right on the grid giving him a difficult time of things during the first stage of the race.

For Hamilton, a needless five-second penalty for unnecessarily impeding Daniel Ricciardo under the safety car potentially lost him the race.

But for Sebastian Vettel, an attacking strategy for the first tyre stop gave the four-time Formula One World Champion the advantage and he never looked back.

‘It was a really great team effort today. Right after the start I could feel that ?yeah, we?re quick, we can have a word?. So really tried to put Valtteri under pressure. He didn?t do any mistakes. It was difficult down the straights to get near him. But then we obviously went for the undercut, early pit stop, worked fantastic, very good job.’ Vettel told formula1.com.

‘the final stint, obviously we had quite a decent gap plus the safety margin of Lewis? penalty ? which I wasn?t sure why but it didn?t matter at that point ? and I just tried to control the gap to Valtteri, maybe pulling away a little bit and at that point just controlling the gap. He [Hamilton] was very fast when he came out. I was expecting him to be quick on a new set of supersoft tyres but probably not that quick and he was closing in. When I faced the traffic I lost a lot of time but then obviously he had to face traffic as well. In the end it was safe enough.