Sebastian Vettel has expressed surprise at Ferrari’s pace deficit as he and team-mate Kimi Räikkönen struggled for performance during a wet qualifying session for the Italian Grand Prix.
Vettel, who leads the title race by seven points, could muster only the eighth best time in a rain-affected Q3 session at Monza, with Räikkönen just fractionally faster in seventh.
Though both drivers will move up two places on the grid due to penalties for the Red Bull drivers, Vettel was left to rue Ferrari’s lack of competitiveness in the conditions.
“Well, [I’m] surprised let’s say by how quick the others went,” said Vettel, who is set to line up from sixth position.
“Clearly we couldn’t go at the same pace. At this stage we don’t know why. I’m sure there are a couple of things that we’ll look into and try to understand.
“Nevertheless I think it was an important day, something didn’t work, didn’t come together, but now it is what it is and we’ll see what we can do tomorrow.”
On his race prospects, Vettel said: “We have a good car, so I don’t think we need to be afraid.
“Today didn’t go the way we wanted, but for tomorrow I think we can make up a lot of ground. The car is quick, we know that, you can overtake here, so it should be a fun race.”
Räikkönen also admitted that he struggled to extract pace from the SF70-H in the slippery conditions.
“We’re not fast enough,” he said. “At least for my car, I don’t know [about] the other car, but I struggled a lot for the grip.
“Either we didn’t make the tyres work, or whatever it is, it was very slippery, that’s for sure.
2Especially with the low downforce you cannot you cannot put enough force in the tyres and it’s a never-ending story.”
