Sebastian Vettel says Ferrari has to get to the bottom of its gearbox issues after incurring another penalty at Silverstone ahead of the British Grand Prix. He will start from 11th on the grid in Sunday’s race.
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I think the pace was actually okay and we were able to split the Red Bulls, but we didn’t in the end.
“Obviously I think the other occasions it was more a outcome of other things happening, especially the first one – if you crash, obviously it was a mild crash, but still a crash in China, and we had to change it”.
“We had the same failure yesterday so we need to have a look”.
“We didn’t have anything [like it] before so it might be something to do with the track-band, it happened at the same place here. It is something we need to fix, plus if it happens in the race you don’t finish”.
It is Vettel’s third gearbox failure of the season, having suffered the same problem in Russian Federation.
Ferrari are second overall in the championship but have yet to win a race this season. “We’ll try to make a good start, make the tires work and take the right decisions”.
The Italian team have been plagued by reliability gremlins in 2016 and were even usurped as Mercedes’ closest challengers by Red Bull at Silverstone, with Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo out-qualifying both Ferrari drivers.
Vettel and teammate Kimi Raikkonen, who was re-signed by Ferrari for 2017 on Friday, wound up fifth and sixth in qualifying before the German took his penalty.
“I kind of expected it to be a bit tricky here and that’s how it turned out to be”, the Finn admitted. So I’m very confident we’ll be fine tomorrow but we were caught out twice by the same problem. “For us it just makes it easier”.
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“We are a bit stuck with certain things”.
