Sebastian Vettel will follow in the footsteps of boyhood hero Michael Schumacher when he makes his first home appearance in Ferrari red in this weekend’s German Grand Prix, but his hopes of emulating his idol and racing to victory on Sunday appear remote. “I think we don’t have to hide, in terms of race pace we are fast, then it should be an interesting race”.
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He sees no reason why Red Bull can not further pull clear and says the push to close down Mercedes will ultimately help it seal the runner-up spot in the title chase if it continues to make progress.
“Everybody can see where we finished and it’s obviously a bit painful for all of us”, said Raikkonen. “Well I think it’s clear that in qualifying we were not as competitive as we wanted to be, not just in who is ahead but who is behind, and looking at the gaps we’re only two tenths quicker than the Force India”. I was reasonably happy with my lap, but it wasn’t quick enough, there was a bit of time we lost here and there, overall we struggled a bit to extract the pace from the auto.
“It wasn’t too bad when we had fresh tyres, but they seemed to drop off quite quickly”.
“Somehow we lost a bit and now we need to understand what happened this afternoon. But that’s always the aim”.
With Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen scoring Red Bull’s first double podium since last year’s Hungarian Grand Prix, the team moved ahead of Ferrari into second in the constructors’ championship.
“The end result was the same and it doesn’t matter how you get it”. “My last try in Q3 was a bit more tricky, I was struggling a little bit with the feeling from the tyres, but apart from that we had no massive issues”.
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“We are not where we want to be and clearly there are a lot of things we need to do better. It was quite a boring race, in a way, not much happening where I was, so if we can be fast that will obviously make it more exciting”.
