Ferrari must fix gearbox weakness, says Vettel

Under the sporting regulations, gearboxes have to last for six consecutive events and, although Ferrari fitted a new one to Vettel’s vehicle on Saturday morning, as soon as he left the pits the next six-race cycle started.

The Italian team have been plagued by reliability gremlins in 2016 and were even usurped as Mercedes’ closest challengers by Red Bull at Silverstone, with Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo out-qualifying both Ferrari drivers. “That will change the behavior of tires and many other things”. It was a bit tricky in the end but that’s how it turned out to be.

“Probably Kimi and myself have the least ego problems in the whole paddock, which I think is good for the team”. “We don’t have enough speed”.

Raikkonen’s contract was renewed to 2017 on Friday but he brushed off the importance of out-qualifying Vettel.

“It just makes it easier for us with people not hassling us around these kind of things”, said the Finn. “For us it just makes it easier”. “It gives me pleasure to see disappointed people!” The issue we had yesterday and today is something new and we need to fix it.

“We are working in the same direction and on the track we try to race hard – as we’ve shown in the past in the races where we have raced for position – but that’s normal”.

“This one here was unique, something new, something we haven’t suffered before”, Vettel said.

“It means nothing. You guys always have a lot of interest at looking at the numbers, but he had issues and if you make one mistake here there’s a big time difference, so it means nothing”. It happened at the same place, entering the main straight ending the lap so we need to have a look and understand it.

“I just went for an upshift and it just didn’t go up”.

“We took some precautions going to qualifying, we didn’t have anything in qualifying and didn’t see anything on Kimi’s vehicle”.