Recurring gearbox failures a concern for Vettel

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Sebastian Vettel admitted that the current spate of gearbox failures on his Ferrari is definite a concern, and was not anything that they had experienced with the units in the past.

Vettel lost one gearbox at during Friday practice, but it was the failure of a brand new gearbox in FP3 that is of most concern - not least because it leaves Vettel with a five place grid penalty for tomorrow's British Grand Prix.

"It's a failure we've never had before, we've never seen," he said. "It was unique, something we haven't suffered before. Obviously it's something we have to understand because we had the same failure yesterday and this morning so we need to have a look."

Vettel didn't believe that the gearbox problems in Austria and now at Silverstone were related to issues they had experiences earlier in the season.

"I think the other occasions it was more a consequence of things happening, especially the first one - you crash, obviously it was a very mild crash, just a little crash in China and obviously you have to change it.

"You see other people crashing and they have to change it - they're not made for crashing if you see what I mean. But surely the issue we had today and yesterday is something new and we have to fix it.

"Obviously we've had I don't know how many races now and didn't have this kind of problem so we need to try and understand what's changed in the last couple of events and what's different here than around other places."

Even without the gearbox problems, qualifying was another disappointment for Ferrari with Vettel only managing to be sixth fastest in Q3. He'll start tomorrow's race from 11th after the gearbox penalty is applied.

"The car wasn't bad. Q3 was bad because I didn't get the laps in, other than that it was quite okay," he insisted. "I think better than we expected after practice where it was a bit difficult. Now obviously it was a shame that we couldn't show what the car could do.

"I was on a good lap, the first one, and obviously lost the rear in Stowe. I was able to catch it but the majority of lap time was lost. And then the second attempt I just went a little too deep and wide in turn 1 and it was difficult to recover from there.

"So, didn't have a good lap in qualifying when it mattered. I think the pace was actually okay and we were able to split the Red Bulls, but we didn't in the end so that's a shame."

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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.