Ferrari struggled for raw pace throughout the weekend, with Kimi Raikkonen finishing fifth while Vettel was down in ninth having started outside the top ten due to a gearbox penalty. With Red Bull finishing second and fourth – and showing the pace to worry Mercedes – Vettel is not overly concerned by his old team’s pace as he believes Ferrari failed to get the most out of its car.
“We want to win, so I don’t really care what’s going on behind,” Vettel said in reference to the six-point gap between Ferrari and Red Bull in the constructors’ standings. “As long as they stay behind, I think it was arguably a strong weekend for them and not so strong for us.
“It’s probably the only race this year where in terms of race pace we weren’t able to fight them and beat them. But I’m pretty confident that things will look different again in two weeks. But that’s not an excuse, we had a bad weekend and we need to make sure we address this and we take actions and move forward, understand why we struggled more than other people.
“One thing is generally everyone is improving – we are, other people are – but I think this weekend was a step back for us in terms of competitiveness, not necessarily a big step up for other people.”
And Vettel has urged Ferrari not to overreact after such a difficult weekend, saying there were a number of factors which contributed to the final result.
“It was not an easy race. For sure in these conditions it’s easy to get it wrong and make a mistake. I think you saw a lot of people going off track, unfortunately I was one that went off track and spun. So that lost us a lot of time but I think overall it was quite tricky with the conditions until the end with a dry line and wet patches here and there.
“So I think the fact that then I was stuck in traffic for some laps doesn’t help with looking after tyres etc. So you lose the rhythm a little. As a result you can see we weren’t quick enough to challenge for a podium this weekend, so there’s plenty of things for us to understand and learn.
“In this regard I think it has been a weak race for us but I don’t think we need to turn the world upside down. We know the car that we have and I think if you look at the performance yesterday it was more or less in line. Again, it’s not the most competitive weekend for us, but for sure today we seemed to lose a little bit compared to the people ahead.”
