Vettel not worried about deficit to Mercedes

Sebastian Vettel claims that things aren’t as bad as they look for Ferrari following their struggles to fight Mercedes so far at Suzuka.

The Scuderia looked to have surpassed Mercedes as the fastest team on the grid in the previous four race weekends, but have have been way off the pace of the German team thus far.

However, Vettel claims that things haven’t been as bad for them as the timesheets may suggest.

“It was not as bad as maybe you think,” Vettel said via Crash.net.

“I think we were quite OK, but just lacking overall pace. I think Mercedes is very comfortable straight from this morning, so not a surprise they were able to show that again in FP2.”

With a typhoon on the horizon, qualifying has been pushed back to Sunday, meaning teams will get no on-track time on Saturday, and Vettel says the team will do indoor work to try to improve in time for the race.

“For us, I think we have a bit of room to improve. It wasn’t an ideal session, maybe using our tyres not the way we could have,” he explained.

“But overall, I think we’ll see what we find tomorrow. We’ll stay indoors and see what happens on Sunday.”

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