The Red Bull duo of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber were not the class of the field for the two Thursday practice sessions in Monaco today, but both are still confident of having a good weekend in the principality.
Vettel was the fastest driver in Free Practice 1, but dropped down to fifth on the timesheets for the afternoon session. He tried the super soft Pirelli tyre this afternoon, and also had is first contact with the infamous Monaco barriers this morning.
“It's been positive so far,” he said, in summary. “Both tyres are working well and seem to be lasting, which is important. We will see how the conditions are on Sunday, but the supersoft tyre seems to be the preferred one for qualifying. It seems to be quicker and you can extract more lap time out of it.
“I had a good feeling straight away in the car; it's fun driving around here; it's a different track and it's quite bumpy and rough. I brushed the wall after three laps, so hopefully that's that done for the weekend! The car looks competitive, but everyone is very close to each other, so it looks tight.”
Mark Webber fared even worse than his team-mate today. A technical problem prevented him from setting a lap time this morning, and finish the day down in eighth place.
“I had a gear selection issue this morning, which meant I lost some lap time, otherwise it wasn't too bad.” he said. “This afternoon was always going to be the case where you're going out a little bit behind, but we still got a lot of good information.
“It's easy to get out there and tryand get to where you should be and make mistakes, but we got the information and have a lot to go through. We should be alright by Saturday. We will get back into the groove on Saturday and recover the weekend.”
