Vettel warns Ferrari changes will take time

Sebastian Vettel says it will take time for the changes Ferrari made after recent poor races to have an impact on the team.

Ferrari was off the pace it expected in the German Grand Prix, following disappointing results in Britain and Hungary as Red Bull moved second in the constructors' championship. Vettel said following Hockenheim that the races had helped show Ferrari where it is lacking compared to its rivals, allowing the team to take action.

• Poor recent pace helped Ferrari identify weaknesses

Despite four weeks since the last race, the mid-season shutdown means teams have been unable to carry out much work in that time and Vettel it says it will be a while before Ferrari's changes have an impact.

“Well as you can imagine obviously it is difficult to respond one day after," Vettel said. "In Formula One you see things changing quickly but sometimes things do take some time.

"I think we had lessons that we definitely learned in the previous races but we follow the plan so Spa has been on the schedule for the whole season so far and we arrive here with the bits that we wanted to arrive.

"Obviously the lessons we learned from previous races some of them we were able to make some small changes for here but I think for later in the season we’ll probably see more of that. I think given the fact that also there was a break but in reality there was only really one or one and a half weeks to react you cannot expect huge changes.”

Ferrari arrives at Spa having been aggressive with its tyre strategy, but Vettel is confident the team has made the right choice despite high temperatures.

“Well I think generally people are always pushing their stint lengths, I think it’s nothing surprising. Obviously last year something went wrong. We have a prototype tyre to test which is sort of targeting to address some of that in the future.

"For the tyre allocation this weekend, we hope we don’t have to use the medium, usually it’s quite a lot slower so we’re pretty confident that we chose the right tyres and just are able to spend more time on the proper tyres, on the quicker tyres.”