F1: Vettel Not Worried By RB8 Reliability

Formula 1

F1: Vettel Not Worried By RB8 Reliability

Sebastian Vettel is confident the Red Bull RB8 car will hold up just fine...

Adam Cooper | http://www.speedtv.com | Posted March 14, 2012 Melbourne (AUS)

Sebastian Vettel is winless in 2012. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Sebastian Vettel has downplayed any concerns about the reliability of the Red Bull RB8 after some niggling problems showed up in testing.

Vettel did very little running on his final day in Barcelona with the Melbourne update package, but he insisted Wednesday that he is not worried.

“Obviously we would have loved to have done a bit more on the last day,” said Vettel. “Reliability is not disastrous, to be honest with you, it might look worse than it is. You have to understand when it’s a new car, especially in winter testing, when you’ve got a problem or some numbers start to go somewhere you don’t like, then you stop as a precaution.

“Then you check the car and that takes time, if you have to take the floor off or certain parts of the car off to have a look or to get to them is not so easy. So you lose track time, which is a shame, but that’s how it is. All in all, we would have loved to do more laps, but I think the issues we had, we always found the solution, and pretty quickly. But obviously you can’t react on the same day.

“For here we should be all set, and we’ll see how we get on. Obviously it’s like every year, cars are built on the limit, and you always try to get a little bit more, especially with the regulations staying pretty similar year by year you try to push the boundaries a little bit more. That’s F1. Cars are built on the limit, and they also do break from time to time.”

Vettel admitted that, like most observers, he’s not sure exactly how things stand among the top teams.

“You never know what’s going to happen, and to be honest, it would be pretty boring if we would,” the reigning World Champion said. “I think not even half the people would be here or would make the effort to fly out to see what’s going to happen if we already knew before.

“That’s the great thing. I think in particular this year you don’t really know where you are. It looks as if all the teams are very close to each other. There could be a couple of surprises. Lotus was very strong at the test. We’ll have to wait, and then only a couple of days more and we’ll know a lot more.”

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.