Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsFerrari

Vettel: Rosberg time is Ferrari benchmark

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Sebastian Vettel says Nico Rosberg’s time during the second day of the final test at Barcelona is the benchmark for Ferrari to aspire to.

Rosberg set a time 1.2s quicker than the field on Friday afternoon having run the soft tyre in anger for the first time. While Vettel was 2.6s slower than Rosberg in the SF15-T the four-time world champion says he is pleased with the mileage that Ferrari was able to complete and now has a target time to aim for.

“A very positive point is that we did a lot of laps today, no doubt,” Vettel said. “You want to arrive in Melbourne and you want to make sure you finish the race. That’s priority number one and then obviously you want to be as quick as you can. That’s what we’re working on, trying to improve the car bit by bit and understand the car a little bit more with every test. It’s not so easy to be honest, because the conditions are changing.

“Today I think was one of the better days with fairly constant wind conditions in particular. The track was usable, it wasn’t too cold and we got a lot of good data, so we picked the right day to do a lot of laps. In terms of performance though it’s difficult to say where we stand compared to other people.

“I’m sure that the Mercedes time today was very, very competitive and is a benchmark but we knew that they are the ones to beat.”

Having set his own best lap on soft tyres, Vettel doesn’t believe his lap time is comparable to Rosberg’s.

“I was pretty happy with [the soft tyre laps]. Obviously nowhere near in terms of lap time compared to what Nico did, but it was a different point of the day and probably all set up a little bit differently. All in all I got in to the groove pretty well, had a couple of decent runs.”

Full times and day two as it happened

Click here for the gallery from day two of the final test

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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.