Vettel hoping for Styrian rain this weekend

Sebastian Vettel said he would be up for racing in the wet in Austria at the weekend, with concerns over Aston Martin’s race pace heading into Sunday.

Both Vettel and team-mate Lance Stroll were comfortably inside the top 10 in FP2 at the Red Bull Ring, with the German praising the car for its one-lap speed after qualifying runs, but he feels there are still improvements to be made from the team’s pace over a race distance.

The four-time World Champion has been showing more speed in his new team in the last couple of races, following up his podium in Azerbaijan with another strong showing at Paul Ricard last time out to earn a points finish.

With plenty of running still to be done, he hopes for a bit of rain to spice things up over the course of the weekend in Austria.

Do not disturb. 🤫 #F1 #StyrianGP pic.twitter.com/XXBFhaEmYQ

— Aston Martin Cognizant F1 Team (@AstonMartinF1) June 25, 2021

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“I think it was okay,” Vettel said of his practice running overall, via Formula1.com. “The one-lap pace looked a bit better today but I think, on the long-run pace, I think we still need to do a bit of work.

“It’s obviously good that we know what we’re lacking, but not so easy to change that, so we’ll see.

“It’s nice to be here, I was expecting some rain to be honest. It didn’t come, but maybe we’ll get some tomorrow.

“It is what it is. It’s summertime, there’s mountains around and it’s obviously quite hot, so you have local showers. We just need to make sure we’re on the right tyre at the right time.

“I think it’s very difficult to make predictions, but I wouldn’t mind having some wet weather running. I don’t think we’ve had much yet [this season], we had some at Imola but it would be nice to get some.”

With concerns over the team’s long-run pace, Vettel says the car needs to improve in multiple areas to be competitive in the race.

“It’s a little bit of everything,” he continued when asked if there were any specifics on what needed changing on the car. “I think we weren’t as quick as we would like both on the straights and in the corners.

“It’s a bit hard to get everything at once, but I’ll pass it onto the engineers and we’ll see what we get.”