“We felt that once Sebastian had passed Carlos Sainz and was running in clean air, you could see that his pace was strong, stronger than ours and the obvious way that they were going to navigate themselves past us was through a three stop,” explained Horner.

“So we had to take a tactical decision at that point to say do we try and cover Vettel with one of our cars, therefore the best car which we believed had the best chance of winning the race, which was the lead car, and we elected to go for the three stop.

“It looks like Ferrari made that same choice at that point in time. Ferrari then went very, very early on their last stint to try and get Sebastian track position and obviously we pitted I think five or six laps later with Daniel which gave him a much a better tyre.”