Vettel denies Ferrari showboating on Fridays

Ferrari team boss Maurizio Arrivabene said after the Austrian Grand Prix that he wanted an end to the 'fake' Ferrari optimism that was produced by the strong practice pace shown by his team.

Speaking about the situation at Silverstone, Vettel said the conclusion was not that Ferrari was doing anything to look better than it was, like running with low fuel levels.

Instead, he suggested that the ability of the Mercedes teams to turn up their engine settings for the race meant that Ferrari was not as strong on Sundays.

"I think in general we know from Friday to Saturday Mercedes turns the engine up," explained Vettel. "It is not just [the] Mercedes [team], if you look at Williams on Friday versus Sunday there is a massive step.

"That is one of the lessons learned. And not so long ago they changed their engines, and that is one of the differences compared to previous races - that they can be a lot more greedy on Sunday, which makes it more difficult to beat them on the race.

"But we have to focus on ourselves. There are some things in the pipeline. We hope to do some small steps and hopefully we find a little bit for the race too."

No showboating

Vettel was insistent that Ferrari had never intended to deliberately raise expectations by running low fuel levels on Fridays.

"I am not telling you how much fuel we are running but I can assure you we are not running low fuel for our long runs," he said.

"You can see the pace being quite different. I think it is mostly explained by the fact that some teams can be a lot more aggressive on Saturday/Sunday compared to Friday."