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F1 US GP: Vettel bemoans missed track time, lands reprimand

Sebastian Vettel says his Ferrari felt nervous and off balance after Friday free practice due to missing chunks of running time when parts of his front wing and wing mirror dropped off his car in FP1.

The German driver ended the second free practice session fourth fastest with a best lap of 1m 38.178s but says the balance and set-up of his Ferrari was challenging throughout the day having lost time in FP1 when bits of carbon fibre came loose from his front wing, which also clipped his wing mirror which dislodged it.

To compound Vettel's difficult day, at the end of FP2 he was handed his first reprimand of 2016 for not staying to the left of a bollard when entering the pitlane in FP2.

Vettel blames the time lost fixing the issue as the reason he failed to find a comfortable set-up with his Ferrari but is confident solutions will be found overnight to close the gap to Red Bull and Mercedes.

"It was a difficult day to be fair this morning we had some problems with a little bit of the wing which failed and came off, so we lost some track time which became costly in the afternoon because we couldn't really rebalance the car," Vettel said. "So we have been on the backfoot today and we are not entirely happy with the balance of the car yet.

"It is a little bit of nervous all around but I think for tomorrow we can improve then usually Friday you don't see the full picture anyway. Hopefully tomorrow will be a bit stronger.

"We know what we were doing but as I said we didn't have the best day. It will be very close and difficult to match them tomorrow with the speed they showed today but I think the Ferrari you saw today was not the Ferrari you will see tomorrow." 

Zdroj: crash.net