F1: Vettel Upbeat As Red Bull Adds New Package

Formula 1

F1: Vettel Upbeat As Red Bull Adds New Package

Red Bull driver will try out new updates on Saturday...

Adam Cooper | http://www.speedtv.com | Posted March 02, 2012 Barcelona (ESP)

Red Bull Racing's German Sebastian Vettel walks in the pits at Catalunya's racetrack in Montmelo, near Barcelona, during the Formula One test days on March 2, 2012. (Photo: Getty Images)

Sebastian Vettel is positive about progress with the Red Bull RB8 after setting third best time in Barcelona today, despite losing time with a stoppage on track.

The team will debut a major update package on Saturday – something that McLaren is also doing.

“It was quite a messy day because of the fog and there were quite a lot of red flags out there so it was hard to get into a good rhythm,” said the double champion. “We had our own stoppage on the circuit, but it was no problem. It’s never nice to stop but we brought the car back and it wasn’t a big problem. We didn’t fulfill the program entirely but I think we are heading in a good way.

“I have one more day to go and so far testing has gone pretty well. Not perfect of course, it never is, but all in all I feel quite happy in the car. It’s more or less what we expected and hopefully we’ll have another two good days to prepare for the first race.”

Concerning the updates, Vettel added: “The last couple of days of testing are always quite important as you always bring a few new things and it’s much closer to the car you will race in Melbourne, so we’ll see if that works out and hopefully we’ll be able to make another small step forward before the first.”

Vettel’s race engineer Guillaume Rocquelin said that it has been a good day on Friday: “The fog this morning wasn’t ideal but the circuit was very good in giving everybody an extension and we did get a decent amount of laps in. However, even when the session did get going it was a fairly choppy start as there were a lot of red flags and as Sebastian said it was difficult to find a rhythm.

“But Seb got through most of the program, which today was just background testing stuff, we weren’t focusing on performance at all. There are a lot of boxes we need to tick to go racing and we got quite a few done today.”

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.