Sebastian Vettel finished the second free practice session at the Sakhir International Circuit in Bahrain in sixth, lower down the order than the Maranello-based squad would have anticipated.
The Scuderia Ferrari driver hit trouble in the SF16-H when he lost drive late on in the session, before the decision was made to park the SF16-H at Turn 8. Prior to that the German did get close to the Mercedes pair on his soft tyre run, and is still positive ahead of the Saturday sessions.
“We don’t know 100% what happened. I felt out of Turn 4 that I lost drive, so I decided to stop. Obviously we don’t want to take a risk at this stage, damaging the car or the engine. It’s a shame because I would have loved to cover more laps, but that’s what it is. “
“Obviously, it was incredibly important to do the mileage today and get the information on Friday, but it’s even more important to make sure that the car is in good conditions for the whole weekend and for the whole season. Tomorrow I think that if you want to qualify as high up as possible you have to use the Super softs. It’s not a big secret. We saw that a lot of people were doing their homework today.”
“As for me, I haven’t done everything I could because we had to stop, but Kimi did a lot of laps, so it’s still reasonable. Coming down to our rivals, I don’t know what they did today. I think we can still improve for tomorrow. Hopefully we can be a little bit closer, so we’ll see.”
