As soon as he pitted with ~30 laps to go from the softs to supersofts, there was never any shame about it, there was no chance in hell he could drive fast lap after lap for the remainder of the race and get a podium without Max/Lewis/Ricci having issues.
Bottas (on supersofts from race start) was used as a buffer to try and hold up Vettel and Ferrari blinked first. Another few laps and Bottas' tyres would have fallen off the cliff, he would have to pit, Vettel would then had needed less quick laps on supers and would have had more of a chance of taking third of Ricci. IMO
lol, first off, half the grid used supersofts for almost as long as Vettel did, except they did qualifying on them and were driving on a greener track with much heavier cars, none of them showed major signs of tire deg, but Vettel's dropped off a cliff... also in a single lap?
Tire deg does not show up as closing a 1.5-2 second gap that happened thanks to the salty Alonso, to dropping 2 seconds back from Ricciardo a couple of laps later, this tires don't work great then drop off a cliff, they get gradually slower than pretty much destroy themselves at the point performance would drop off a cliff. He did not have significant tire deg. Ferrari are actually saying it was more of a fuel thing. He was using more fuel than most and near the end he had to back off the fight, he could have gotten 3rd but wouldn't have actually finished the race, and that is also why he dropped back even more massively than usual in the last lap.
Tire deg was never the issue, that last lap probably ruled out 3rd being that even if ALonso didn't get in the way and even if he got infront and managed to defend while saving a lot of fuel, had he required that slow a lap to make it back to the pits on 1l + fumes(they need a 1 litre left iirc) then Ricciardo would have likely passed him easily by that point or Vettel wouldn't have been able to give it up and lost simply because he couldn't pass scrutineering after the race.
As for Bottas... lol, sure, he was that slow to hold up Vettel.... even though being much faster would have gotten him 4th easily, derp. Mercedes even completely messed up strategy, zero tire life issues for softs getting to the end. By not pitting Bottas frankly on the same lap, but letting Vettel pit the lap after Ham then Bottas the lap after that, they allowed Vettel past bottas without a fight. If Bottas pitted same lap as hamilton or same lap as Vettel, Bottas comes out on fresh tires and Vettel has to pass him on track. With Bottas's pace I wouldn't be surprised if he was passed easily, but it would still have held up Vettel much more than what they actually did.
Bottas's pace was bad, nothing more or less, and Mercedes chose the worst possible pit timing to hold up Vettel as much as he possibly could.
