Sebastian Vettel is unconcerned by the gap to Mercedes in qualifying for the Chinese Grand Prix, expecting to challenge in Sunday’s race.
While Vettel will start from third place behind the two Mercedes drivers, he was 0.9s slower than Lewis Hamilton in qualifying. However, Vettel believes Ferrari got its strategy right as he feels it has saved a set of tyres for Sunday and should be in a position to push Mercedes hard over a race distance.
“We’ll see, we knew it would be tough today in qualifying to be really, really close,” Vettel said. “I think Q1 and especially Q2 looked quite promising. In Q3 I think it was a little bit more what we saw in practice so quite a large gap but I think for us we are fairly happy to make sure that we are right behind them.
“Obviously we want to close the gap, maybe tomorrow we are a little bit closer. But for now I think we can be reasonably happy. It’s a bit of a shame not to get both cars on the second row - I was told Kimi [Raikkonen] was a bit unlucky on the warm-up lap - but tomorrow’s race we should have good pace and we will see what we can do.”
With Ferrari using soft tyres in Q1 - along with every team except Mercedes - Vettel believes the team made the right call.
“It was probably possible but very, very , very close so if you don’t make it then you start the race from tomorrow from P16 or 17 so I think that’s why we decided to do that. If I’m right everyone put on the options in the first part of qualifying, but I’m not sure about those two [Mercedes] … they didn’t? Then they were just quick!
“Obviously we tried to save a set for tomorrow and hopefully we can be closer in the race.”
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