2017 Malaysian Grand Prix - Round 15

There was no way Ferrari was going to lose this race. Except it did. The SF70-H was by far the fastest car as Formula 1 visited the hot and aerodynamically demanding Sepang circuit for the final time. But Sebastian Vettel’s broke before doing a lap of qualifying and front-row qualifier Kimi Räikkönen’s suffered an apparently identical failure on the way to the grid.

On paper, it seemed to have opened the door to Lewis Hamilton. He had, after all, set pole in Vettel’s absence a bare five-hundredths faster than Räikkönen. But the Merc’s one-lap pace – or more specifically Hamilton’s acrobatic skills and the Merc’s 0.5sec Q3 engine advantage over the Renault-powered Red Bulls – flattered its actual race pace. The analysis from inside the team from the admittedly curtailed practice sessions of Friday and Saturday was that in race trim the Ferrari was up to 1sec per lap faster than the Mercedes, the Red Bull 0.5sec faster. The W08 just does not like circuits with a big spread of corner speeds like this, slow corners like T15, 9 and 1-2, or very hot tarmac. It takes particular exception to a combination of all those things.