Sebastian Vettel looks set to take the fight to Mercedes in the Bahrain GP, despite losing out in the final stages of qualifying.
Ferrari pushed Mercedes hard though most of the session, but when it mattered at the end of Q3 the silver cars found a lot more time, leaving Vettel in third.
“I was very happy with the first attempt and my second attempt was more or less copy-paste,” he said. “I thought that there was a little bit, there was, but five hundredths is probably not enough if they improve by half a second. I think very happy today, very happy with the car, the car felt fantastic throughout qualifying, it just kept getting better, which is natural as the circuit gets quicker.
“But there isn’t one place or anything wrong on the track, where the car doesn’t feel right. It feels good. We know that we are not where we want to be, but step by step I think we are getting there. We know what to do. Let’s see what we can do tomorrow. We’ll push them very hard. Ideally, we’ll do the same thing on the start as we did two weeks ago. I wouldn’t mind! Last year we saw an interesting race, so let’s see what happens tomorrow night.”
Vettel is confident that he can race the Mercedes duo: “Last year we were very strong in the race. Kimi put a lot of pressure on Nico at the end of the race and managed to get past so I think we can be in good shape tomorrow. Obviously it’s impossible to predict but the car feels good; the car felt good this afternoon with different conditions to the evening. It kept getting better.
“Some of it, I guess, is the track but also we made little improvements here and there. So, very happy with how the car feels on one lap but also for the race. So, yeah, high on confidence. Whether it’s enough, we’ll see – but we’ll try to give them a hard time.”
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