Both Ferrari drivers have locked out the second row of the grid, starting behind Nico Rosberg and Daniel Ricciardo. Starting from P4 on the grid, Sebastian Vettel doesn’t feel that his qualifying run was worthy of a top three result.
The German was at the top of the time charts of for the first qualifying session, with his teammate, Kimi Räikkönen, directly behind. For the second qualifying session, the two Ferrari drivers swapped positions on the time charts, placing Vettel as second fastest. The final qualifying session resulted in both Ferrari drivers being overtaken by the Mercedes of Rosberg and the Red Bull of Daniel Ricciardo.
Vettel wasn’t overly shocked by not finishing in the top three during qualifying, as his performance was just not top notch:
“I don’t think I deserved to be in the top three today. We saved tyres, so we start tomorrow on Supersofts. I thought I could make it in the last lap, but my only run wasn’t special overall. I asked too much from my tyres already at the beginning and then I did a couple of small mistakes here and there, which cost me a lot of lap time. So in the end my run was not so good, but this is how it is and we can’t change it now.”
On the other side of the garage, Räikkönen was not happy with his starting position:
“It’s more of a disappointment than anything else: today we had the chance of getting a better result. I don’t know if pole position could have been possible, but for sure we could have easily been second fastest. In the second last corner I ran wide and lost a lot of time. The position could have been much worse after that mistake, but we still have third place, which is not such a bad starting point for the race.”
Although Ferrari didn’t finish as low as they could have, they were also not as high up the starting grid as they had hoped. The Prancing Horse will be looking for their first race victory of the season, as one of their main rivals, Lewis Hamilton, will be at the back of the grid and forced to battle his way through the field, making it seem impossible for him to seriously challenge the Ferrari. Only Ricciardo and Rosberg stand in the way of the first Ferrari 1-2 victory since the 2010 German Grand Prix or their first victory since Singapore last year.
Although the team will be trying their best to advance as far up as possible in the race, Räikkönen insists that the race is very unpredictable at the moment, saying: “It’s hard to predict what will happen tomorrow, it will depend on so many factors, the weather and the different tactics from the teams.”
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