F1 News
Vettel: "Rivals are faster than us"
Sebastian Vettel says that Ferrari's rivals, Mercedes and Red Bull, will be faster during qualifying for the Singapore Grand Prix, even though his teammate Charles Leclerc went fastest in FP3 on Saturday morning.
Leclerc has taken pole and victory in the last two races, in Belgium and Italy, but on a totally different track, the Scuderia are expected to struggle a bit more.
The German has the strange statistic of taking pole at Singapore in odd years, having started from P1 in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017, but he will be up against it if he wants to set the fastest time in today's session.
He said in Ferrari's press release yesterday: "It was not the smoothest of Fridays for us and I think there’s still a margin for improvement on the car. However our rivals look very fast, certainly faster than us.
"The soft is the tyre we don’t use so much, it has greater grip but doesn’t last so long. Today was not that bad and the medium tyre was not much better. However, tomorrow we focus on the softs and when it comes to the race, as usual here, we will all be trying to survive on just one stop and manage the race.
"As I said we can still improve, because the car is not yet doing exactly what I want, and in terms of balance we know where we can find some lap time. All the new parts that we brought seem to work, so let’s see how close we can get tomorrow.”