Two second gap 'not good news' - Vettel

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Sebastian Vettel says the two second gap to Mercedes during Friday practice for the Grand Prix of Europe is "not good news" but insists Ferrari has pace in hand.

Lewis Hamilton was fastest in both practice sessions on Friday, leading team-mate Nico Rosberg by 0.7s in FP2. Sergio Perez was Hamilton's closest challenger over one lap but was 1.1s adrift, while Vettel was the lead Ferrari and two seconds off the pace. While not encouraged by the headline lap times, Vettel is hopeful of closing some of the gap on Saturday.

"It’s not nice, it’s not good news," Vettel said of the deficit to Mercedes. "But some of it we can explain and other bits we have to wait to see what tomorrow brings. It’s been a tricky day for us, maybe not entirely clean if you look at raw pace but then again it’s Friday so no need to worry."

With team-mate Kimi Raikkonen stopping with an MGU-K problem, Vettel says Ferrari was wary he may suffer the same issue but was not concerned having been told to slowly returned to the pits himself during FP2.

"I didn’t have a problem, obviously Kimi had. I don’t know if we were taking precautions at the end. I don’t know exactly what happened. We’ll see.

"Overall, we have the pace. Today we struggled to find it. I don’t think we had a bad day, it’s not great that Kimi couldn’t do the end of the session. We did the laps, the car felt OK, got to know the track. That was quite interesting, that was the main objective for today. What is missing is the speed, but I’m sure we can improve.

"It’s very difficult, all the time we have quite a long straight, leading into hard brakings. At the beginning, to find the right reference is quite tricky. Not much to help the orientation. All the trees look the same. After a while, you find the rhythm, and then you know the bumps and then it’s a bit better. In the beginning, it took some time, plus it’s quite tricky at the start. it’s definitely been more fun this afternoon, it seems a nice track, quite challenging, especially the high-speed sections, the middle and the end of the lap. The narrow bits are quite interesting."

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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.