Both Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel failed to carry their form from pre-season testing into the Friday practices in Bahrain, and could only manage limited mileage.
Mark Webber was hit by a gearbox problem in second practice, ending his session early. In all he only completed 29 laps, with a highest finishing position of 9th, which was in the morning session. From his comments at the end of day, Webber was clearly disappointed. “Not such a good day and not enough mileage. We'll have to regroup and get what we can out of today – we'll be focusing on qualifying in tomorrow's practice.
“We still learnt some stuff today and Seb looked at the tyres. You can already see that it's going to be bloody competitive this year, it's going to be a good fight out there.”
Vettel ended the two sessions in 13th and 5th positions, completing only 35 laps in total. “Unfortunately we didn't get a lot of running today. I would have liked more track time, but it's not Christmas and we're not given things for free. We have a lot of work to do, but we know where we need to improve, so we will work on that.”
