Autosportfoto

F1 British GP: Vettel: Silverstone a blip for Ferrari, not others catching

Sebastian Vettel says while Ferrari remain ahead of Red Bull in the F1 world constructors' championship he won't be concerned by the threat from his former team and feels his squad suffered a poor British Grand Prix rather than his rivals catching up.

The Ferrari driver suffered a gearbox failure for the second consecutive race weekend and was forced to take another five-place grid penalty for the British Grand Prix.

After the sudden rain deluge on the starting grid soaked the Silverstone track, Ferrari's race pace became hampered and while attempting to battle through the mid-pack Vettel's charge failed to match the performance produced by Mercedes and Red Bull.

With Red Bull's promoted second and fourth place results at Silverstone it has seen the Milton Keynes-based squad move to just six points behind Ferrari in the F1 constructors' standings.

After admitting Ferrari needs to analyse its race pace deficit and problems from Silverstone, Vettel doesn't believe Red Bull has leapfrogged the Italian manufacturer in the pecking order.

"We want to win, so I don't really care what's going on behind, as long as they [Red Bull] stay behind," Vettel said. "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. 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."

Vettel will be eager to respond next time out at the Hungarian Grand Prix as he returns to a venue where he claimed one of his three victories in 2015.

Zdroj: crash.net