Sebastian Vettel says he’ll be reliant on team-mate Daniel Ricciardo’s data and set-up for the Spanish Grand Prix after he completed just four laps over the course of first and second practice.
The Red Bull driver stopped on-track during FP1 after an electrical fault which, due to the complexity of the system, meant he was unable to get on track during the second session either.
“We had a simple failure in one of the looms this morning, which caused a short and meant the car stopped,” he explained.
“We had to change the chassis loom, which is a big job so I wasn’t able to go out this afternoon. It’s a small failure, but a big consequence; there was nothing new on that part of the car, it was something new that happened in that area.
“Luckily it happened today [rather than tomorrow], but unfortunately we lost the chance to prepare for Sunday with two cars, so I have to rely on what Daniel did today and get into the rhythm straight away tomorrow.”
Ricciardo believes the lack of running for Vettel could hurt their development programme due to the reliance on one car.
“It’s not great that Seb wasn’t running, two cars means twice the amount of feedback for the team and you don’t learn so much from one when you are trying new parts – but at least we got some good data. The short runs and long runs were both okay today.”
