Mark Webber has played down concerns that Red Bull are struggling for pace in Monaco after finishing Thursday fifth fastest. The two time Monte Carlo winner was six tenths shy of Nico Rosberg in the Mercedes but feels he is better placed heading into the weekend than he was in 2010 or 2012 when he tasted victory.
“I think traditionally we’re never too electric here on Thursday’s, so today was actually one of the better ones we’ve had in the last few years. You’ve got to be very, very focused here; concentration is very, very high.
“It’s a challenging venue to pull everything together; we want to obviously get short run performance as well as gaining short and long run data, which I think we’ve got. There are some quick cars out there; we’ve seen that on Saturday at the last few GPs. All in all, a reasonably smooth day for us, we’ve got plenty to go through now.”
Teammate Sebastian Vettel could only manage ninth thanks to a KERS failure in the afternoon but even with that, he hoped to be a little quicker than he was today.
“I think generally it was okay. Unfortunately we lost quite a lot of time in the afternoon while we were making some changes, but that can happen on Friday, or in this case Thursday.
“We’d like to be a little bit more competitive, so we need to try and find some more lap time. We had a KERS issue this afternoon, so I didn’t use the system during P2. The guys know what the problem was with that.”
