Annoyed Vettel 'not good enough' after losing pole to Raikkonen

40

Ferrari pulled off a dream front-row lock-out for their home race, the Italian Grand Prix, in qualifying on Saturday.

And while Sebastian Vettel was delighted to see the team achieve a 1-2 over their Mercedes rivals, he certainly wasn't happy to miss out on pole for himself.

Vettel had topped the first two rounds of qualifying, but when it came to the pole shoot-out he finished up 0.161s slower than his team Kimi Raikkonen.

The Finn's lap clocked in at 1:19.119s making for an average speed of 263.587kph - the fastest ever recorded in an official Formula 1 session.

"This is great for tomorrow," said Raikkonen, before sounding his traditional note of caution for Sunday's race. "But it's only job half done.

"Hopefully tomorrow everything will go smoothly and we end up in the same positions. Hopefully it will be as good as today."

It's Raikkonen's 18th career pole position, and his first since he started from the front in Monaco in 2017. Before that it was France 2008. At 38 years of age, it makes him the oldest pole sitter since Nigel Mansell in 1994.

"I can't think of a better place to be on pole than our home Grand Prix in front of all the Tifosi," he said. "It doesn't matter where we go around the world, but obviously here, home grand prix, it's full of the great Tifosi."

Raikkonen heads Ferrari 1-2 lockout for home GP

But Vettel was looking distinctly less thrilled by the outcome of qualifying. For his last run of the day he had been sent out first, which allowed Raikkonen to get the benefit of the slipstream.

After being told he had finished in second place, Vettel snapped "We speak after" over the team radio, although he denied it was due to being unhappy about being sent out in front of Raikkonen.

"We have an order that changes every week," he told reporters afterwards. "This weekend was Kimi to go second, simple."

"Clearly I wasn't happy, but I don't tell you why," he continued, denying that he planned to ask the team to impose team orders for the start of tomorrow's race. "No, I don't think anything related to that.

"It's a good result for the team," he insisted. "Not entirely happy with my last run, but I think Kimi was just a little too fast in the end.

"It is always like this in Monza and I think for him it was in a sweet spot," Vettel added. "For now it's great to have both cars at the front.

"To be honest it was not a tidy lap. The other laps were actually better," he admitted. "I lost a bit at the first chicane, second chicane, the Lesmos, pretty much a bit everywhere.

"The last sector was okay but not fantastic, so just not a good lap and not good enough obviously. I was lucky to get second instead of third.

"But it was just not good enough," he reiterated.

Gallery: The beautiful wives and girlfriends of F1 drivers

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter

Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.