Ferrari drivers in aggressive mood in Singapore
The Ferrari duo of Kimi Räikkönen and Sebatian Vettel provided aggressive drives and some brilliant overtaking manoeuvres during the Singapore GP. The Finn driver ended up in fourth place while his team-mate fought his way up to the fifth position after having started the race from the last row of the grid.
Kimi Räikkönen started the race from the fifth place, but he managed to gain a place right at the start. He then pursued the reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton for the last podium position.
The Espoo-born driver managed to pull out a cheeky overtaking manoeuvre on Hamilton when the Briton made a mistake, but the last pit stop deprived Räikkönen of the third place when Mercedes brought Hamilton one lap earlier into the box than Ferrari did with its 2007 world champion.
”It was a good and solid race, the car was behaving well and we had a pretty good speed. Obviously it was very difficult to overtake, but at one point Hamilton made a mistake and I managed to pass him, then after the pit stop he got the position back. We lost the place there, I don’t know how and why they managed to jump us, and I don’t know what would have happened if we would have stayed out.”
“Now we have to go through everything, see what happened and what we could have done better. Today we gained one place from the starting position, but of course this is not the result we are looking for, we are trying to be in position to win, but we need to make the car a bit faster.”
Sebastian Vettel experienced a rollercoaster of feelings over the Singapore GP weekend. He was struggling with some understeer on the opening day, then he was caught out by technical issues in the qualifying. He had to start the race from the 22th position after an element of the right-rear suspension broke right at the start of the starting position decider session.
The German, then, pulled out some clean, but aggressive overtaking manoeuvres in the spectacular, artificially-lit race.
”We sure had a good strategy today, also we had the chance to make a big progress with a safety car, but it didn’t come, so P5 is a very good result. Thanks to the team, I had been a bit down after qualifying yesterday. What nobody wanted to happen has happened, so we had to deal with it and move on. My start was not good, then there was the accident so I took it a bit easy; most important, the car was still intact, but after the restart it was tricky to get the tires working, I was on the primes, I lost quite a lot of time behind the Sauber, it was quite tough to get past, but then it was important to survive until we fitted the last set of Ultrasofts at the end, where we really could unfold the pace. In the last laps we had a big gap from the front and from the back, so I took it easy.”
Vettel also reassured the team’s fans that things are moving in the right direction and that he has every reason to believe that Ferrari will win sooner again.
“I know patience is not a quality of the Ferraristi, it’s not a quality of mine either, we are here to win and we’re not satisfied until it happens, but we’re progressing step by step and one day I think it will pay off. I believe in the team, and I believe that in the future it will be better.”
