Sebastian Vettel was expecting more from his British Grand Prix even after being forced to start from eleventh on the grid following his gearbox penalty, but the German could only manage ninth on race day.
The Scuderia Ferrari driver is seeking answers to why his afternoon at Silverstone was so poor, although he felt the decision to be the first driver onto slick tyres was the correct one and that he was gaining time and places only to lose them again with a quick spin at turn one.
Vettel was disappointed to see the team out-performed on race day by Red Bull Racing, who took second and fourth respectively for Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo, with the German now looking to see what went wrong at Silverstone for the Maranello-based team.
“Today it was a tough day, but we trust our team and trust our car, so there is no reason to panic and to turn the world upside down,” said Vettel. “The call to come into the pits was absolutely right, but then the spin didn’t help, and all my advantage was gone again.
“Now we need to understand where we lost something. We have a lot of things to learn from a weekend like this. Clearly today we weren’t as competitive as in other races, but at least we recovered some points.
“And this was the only race of the year where we weren’t able to beat the Red Bulls in terms of race pace. Things may look different in two weeks’ time, but that shouldn’t be an excuse. We need to go forward and understand why we made a step back this time around”.
Vettel also felt the incident with Felipe Massa that the stewards gave him a time penalty for was a racing incident, having lost grip and run wide, inadvertently pushing the Williams driver off the circuit.
“The penalty in the end didn’t make a difference, it was not on purpose that I was trying to squeeze Felipe. Actually I was going out myself, and I was surprised how little grip there was, going side by side with him. In the end it was a racing incident.“
