Vettel not suspicious of troubles piling up at Silverstone

Sebastian Vettel believes the various issues he's endured so far at Silverstone compared to teammate Charles Leclerc bear no relation with his personal situation at Ferrari.

Vettel was sidelined in Friday's morning practice by an intercooler issue on his SF1000 before his afternoon session was disrupted by a pedal problem.

Another pedal gremlin crept in on Saturday morning, while qualifying left him 10th on Sunday's grid after his fastest lap deleted for exceeding track limits at Copse.

• 2020 British Grand Prix - Qualifying results

But the four-time world champion denied that the mechanical snags were the result of his team neglecting his side of the garage in favour of Leclerc.

"I don't want to accuse anyone of bad intentions," he told Britain's Channel C4. "From my side it was not ideal today.

"I had a lot of trouble finding the rhythm. As I said, I am relatively confident that tomorrow will be better. How much I don't know. I can't promise anything, but it can't get much worse."

Vettel was hard pressed to explain his struggles in qualifying which his teammate concluded an encouraging 4th.

"The honest answer is I don't know," he said. "I mean, I struggled a little bit to get into the groove and into the rhythm, which around here is important.

"Yesterday, we didn't get much running, not many quality laps, and this morning, we had another small issue. So yeah, not ideal, but equally, I thought the car was okay.

"I struggled to put it together. So I think it's probably more me just making sure everything comes together. So not a good good session, but let's see what we can do tomorrow."

In the face of Ferrari's underperformance and his own personal situation, Vettel vowed to "hang in there" for better or for worse.

"Obviously the last two days haven't been good and therefore we lost a little bit of momentum," he said. "

"I thought that other than that, the first weekend was trouble, the second weekend didn't really happen. The third weekend was sort of the first smooth weekend and now we're in trouble again.

"So it's been a bit of a rough start, but you know, there's not much choice.

"I'm determined to hang in there. I think the guys are pushing as much as they can.

"I don't think there's any bad intentions by anyone. So we obviously had some issues yesterday and this morning, but we have to, I guess, at this stage pull through and we'll come out on the other side."

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