F1: Messy Day For Vettel In Australia

Formula 1

F1: Messy Day For Vettel In Australia

Sebastian Vettel's weekend in Melbourne got off to a rocky start...

Adam Cooper | http://www.speedtv.com | Posted March 16, 2012 Melbourne (AUS)

Sebastian Vettel admits he had a messy first day of the season in Australia as he struggled to get the car to his liking.

While everyone had to adjust their programs to deal with the rain that affected both sessions, Vettel conceded that Red Bull was up against it as he wasn’t happy with the car in the first session and only had a brief dry window in FP2.

“This morning it wasn’t very good, I wasn’t happy at all in the car,” said Vettel. “This afternoon I think it was a bit better. Obviously with the conditions it was difficult to get a lot of running. It was more or less the same for all of us, but with the little time we had in the afternoon it was quite OK.

“It’s up to us to find the balance and understand the car a little bit more and learn a little bit more about the car in these conditions on this circuit, and hopefully go a lot quicker tomorrow.

“It’s difficult to say. Tomorrow the target is to make it into Q3, and then we go from there.”

Vettel admitted it will be hard to catch up in the one-hour FP3 session on Saturday.

“You can’t re-invent the wheel,” the reigning World Champion said. “Even though you had a messy Friday due to conditions, it doesn’t mean that on Saturday you just run the whole hour; you don’t have enough tires for that, and obviously it’s about preparing for qualifying mostly.

“You can’t do everything in one hour, so as I said, the most important thing now is to make a step overnight, learn a bit more about the car – the laps in the end were important to understand a bit more – and then we go from there.”

Adam Cooper notched up his 27th season as a racing journalist in 2011. He has written about F1 for SPEED.com since 2005. Follow him on Twitter.