Sebastian Vettel says that Ferrari has to get to the bottom of its gearbox issues after he picked up his third five-place grid penalty of the season at Silverstone, resulting in him dropping form sixth to 11th on the grid.
The German was most concerned about the fact that he had the same failure on Friday and in FP3 this morning.
“It’s difficult to remember all of them!” said Vettel. “One was a consequence of what happened in China, the second one I don’t remember, and this one here obviously was after the failure this morning. It was something new we haven’t suffered before [Silverstone]. Obviously we need to understand, because we had the same failure yesterday and this morning.
“I think the problems that we had yesterday and today, that’s a weakness, and we need to stop it. Obviously I think the other occasions it was more a consequence of other things happening, especially the first one – if you crash, obviously it was a mild crash, but still a little crash in China, and we had to change it. You see other people crashing and they have to change it. They are not made for crashing, if you see what I mean. Surely the issue that we had yesterday and today was something new, and we need to fix it.”
Vettel said the fact that the problem did not occur for a third time in qualifying gave him some confidence heading into the race.
“I think we took some precaution going into qualifying. We didn’t have the failure in qualifying, we didn’t see the failure on Kimi’s car, so I’m fairly confident that we will be fine tomorrow. But surely we got caught out twice with the same problem. We didn’t have it before, so it might be something related to the track here. It happened also at the same place, at the end of the lap onto the main straight, so we need to have a look and really understand what happened.
“Rest assured that we are looking into that. It’s a very high priority, obviously it cost us five positions today, and if it happens again it will do the same again. It’s something we need to fix. Plus, if it happens in the race, you don’t finish.”
Vettel admitted that he had not had a great qualifying session, and felt he should have been a couple of spots higher than sixth.
“I was on good lap the first attempt, and then obviously lost the rear in Stowe. I was able to catch it, but the majority of lap time was lost. And then the second approach I started similar to before but just went in a little bit too deep and wide in Turn One, and then it was difficult to recover from there. I didn’t have good laps at the end of qualifying when it mattered. I think the pace was actually OK, we were able to split the Red Bulls, but we didn’t in the end, so that’s a shame.”
Vettel said he had no problem with the track limits rules imposed this weekend.
“We spoke about it yesterday, everybody was there, so we all agreed on it. That’s it. So it’s OK. I don’t personally care if we can go out or not, it just has to be clear, and it was made clear yesterday.”
