Sebastian Vettel believes that Ferrari had the second fastest car at the Japanese Grand Prix, despite finishing fourth.
After being handed a three-place grid drop from his first corner incident in Malaysia and his teammate taking a five-place grid drop for changing his gearbox, the German started sixth.
Off the line, Lewis Hamilton had a terrible start which saw him slip back down the grid. Vettel was forced to swerve out of the way of the slow moving Mercedes before he made a great start getting up to fourth with Nico Rosberg, Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez ahead of him.
The Ferrari driver was aiming to finish second in the race and used his tyre strategy in a way that he thought would give him the best opportunity to do so.
Without any medium tyres, Vettel was restricted to the soft or hard compound. He took on the hard compound for his second stint before switching back to the soft compound for the last 20 laps.
The intention with this strategy was to get back out on track in front of Hamilton and use the pace of the tyres to catch Verstappen for second. However, with the high level of degradation on the soft tyre and bad traffic, he could not do anything to catch Hamilton or Verstappen to get back up on the podium.
“It is always easy to criticise,” Vettel said, talking about his chosen tyre strategy for the end of the race. “I am sure there are many ‘experts’ that knew better, but on the pit wall as well as in the car, I was keen to go for this strategy so to extend the second stint.
“It’s the fact I lost big chunks of time with the blue flags. I always got the lapped cars right in sector one, when they can’t move, so I was losing a lot of time, and there’s probably where I lost track position to Lewis, who always seemed to clear the lapped cars in the straight. But then the pace wouldn’t have probably been enough to challenge for the podium.
“We had a very good start and made good progress in the first two laps. I think today we had the second fastest car.”
Next time out in Austin, Vettel will be hoping to take the momentum and better pace with him to try and win a race for Ferrari in this season.
With Maurizio Arrivabene being publicly vocal and outspoken about Vettel’s position in the team it may be a case that Vettel feels he needs to re-prove himself to Ferrari. If this is the case today was a good example of the brilliant driving that Ferrari would have initially hired him for.
