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Qualifying report

Vettel is top ten on Bahrain GP qualifying after Ricciardo penalty

Sebastian Vettel: " It will be hard to overtake some cars tomorrow, but we will try our best.”

Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull Racing RB10 spins off the circuit in FP3

Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull Racing RB10 spins off the circuit in FP3

XPB Images

Daniel Ricciardo, Position: 3rd, (3rd Practice – P13, 1:37.119): “Today was nice, tomorrow will be less nice with the ten place penalty, but I was really happy with qualifying. I think through all the runs and on both tyres I was happy with my performance. We may have saved one set of tyres compared to the others, so that’s good, hopefully I’m going to need it tomorrow for coming through the pack; hopefully it will help us. I did the best I could today, so for that I’m pleased. I think Seb and I will both be charging hard tomorrow and will aim to put on a good race.”

Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull Racing RB10 spins off the circuit in FP3
Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull Racing RB10 spins off the circuit in FP3

Photo by: XPB Images

Sebastian Vettel, Position: 11th, (3rd Practice – P21, 1:39.225): “We weren’t quick enough today. I was pretty happy yesterday, but I think this morning didn’t help us when I spun off and did some damage to the car. It’s hard to say how big the impact of that was, as once you start qualifying you just get your head down and try to do the best you can. It was quite tight with Kimi and there wasn’t a lot missing to get to Q3, but that’s how it goes. We get an extra set of tyres tomorrow and I think in the race things will calm down and we’ll be able to be a bit more consistent and attack for some good points. I think our speed is okay on a longer run – and actually on a shorter run too, as Dan has shown today. It will be hard to overtake some cars tomorrow, but we will try our best.”

Christian Horner: “A superb lap from Daniel to finish qualifying in third. It’s unfortunate he has to take the ten place penalty, but nonetheless a really impressive qualifying performance from him today. Unfortunately Sebastian’s qualifying was plagued by a couple of issues that cost him straight line speed and some compromised downshifts. Hopefully that can be rectified overnight. Sebastian will start tenth tomorrow and, with freedom of choice of tyres, it still puts us in a reasonable position for the race.”

Thierry Salvi: “Again a tough session today and quite different for our drivers. We had to work on Seb’s car before qualy and had to face several issues. Seb started in a downgraded mode since we found a damaged wastegate and then the team experienced some problems with the downshifts. We were able to manage during the session until the last run of Q2. Dan again extracted the most from the car to get close to Mercedes. We are clearly in the challenger situation with two silver cars in front as a target. We know what we have to achieve to get back to the front and that’s what we are focused on night and day. Tomorrow will be tricky race starting in the middle and again we’ll ask a lot from both drivers to get back to the front.”

Fixing It in The Field:

It’s not too many weeks since we were testing here in Bahrain, and the team was busy coming up with solutions to the pre-season problems that hampered our progress. The RB10 has come a long way since then but, as Chief Mechanic Kenny Handkammer explains, sudden problems and immediate (often pretty low-tech) fixes are part and parcel of garage life in F1. Now, where’s that lump hammer?

“In terms of quick fixes I suppose the most dramatic one we’ve had at Infiniti Red Bull Racing was when we had a CV boot, a driveshaft boot, let go on Sebastian’s car going into qualifying in China, 2009. The result of that is that all the grease pours out and will destroy the driveshaft. Not good. We had to come up with something quickly and the fix was to squirt as much grease as we could in, get another boot, cut it in half and superglue the whole lot up. It wasn’t pretty, but it was good enough for one lap. We had to do that for every run, but we could only do one run before it went again.

One run was all Sebastian needed though. He put the car on pole and the following day he took our first win. The thing with these type of fixes is that while they do happen, they are a rarity. We did have issues at the start of this year but that was always going to be the case because everything was so new. But once the cars are up and running things like that shouldn’t really happen. When they do though you just need to have faith in your experience, the skills you’ve got in the team and you have to trust that you’ll be able to do a lap somehow. You just have to think on your feet. What’s the he best piece of kit for these situations? Well, you can’t go racing without tie-wraps!”

Infiniti Red Bull Racing

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