Sebastian Vettel, “Ferrari Delivered The F1 Racer I Asked For.”

$RACE

Sebastian Vettel kept Ferrari at the top the timesheets on the morning of the 2nd day of pre-season Formula 1 testing at Barcelona, beating Daniel Ricciardo using the new ultra-soft tires.

Dateline Barcelona, Spain: Sebastian Vettel has a message for Ferrari fans hoping to see an end of Mercedes domination of the premier motorsport, “a lot of work has gone into the new F1 racer, and it will be ready to go when the new season opens in Melbourne, Australia in March.”

Tuesday, Mr. Vettel posted an impressive 46 laps in the the morning session of day 2 of testing at the Circuit de Catalyuna, with his best time of 1:22.810 min, topping the field.

“It was important the car is doing what I asked for,” said Mr. Vettel soon after finishing his testing session. “We know that there is still a lot to do, we need a lot of mileage and there is a lot of stuff to work on but everyone is happy.

We work on a lot of things, you can imagine it is a brand new car so there are a lot of new bits on the car, things in different players etc so we try to understand how the car reacts. Overall we are happy, but we know we need to do a lot of laps,” he said.

When asked if the car’s new configuration is giving him the grip that he wants, Mr. Vettel said: “Well I think always when the car has more grip it suits everybody’s driving style.

This car is a step forward, it is positive, I think the power unit has improved, so yeah, still a lot of stuff that we know is coming and we know we have to improve but overall it has been a good 2 days.”

And he said the Scuderia team put in a lot of work to ensure he and teammate Kimi Raikkonen had every chance of driving at the top of the field.

“There is a lot of work that has gone into the new car, it is a completely different approach and project. Outside of the changes you see, obviously the nose is very different and the front end of the car but inside there has been a lot of changes as well so, I am not going to touch on those, but as you can imagine you try to improve and try to make the car faster overall.

A lot of people have put a lot of sweat and talent in that car so we’ll find out if it turns out to be a good one,” Mr. Vettel told reporters.

Tuesday morning test times, as follows:

Pos	Driver	Team	Time	Laps
1	Sebastian Vettel	Ferrari	1:22.810	46
2	Daniel Ricciardo	Red Bull	1:23.525	58
3	Nico Rosberg	Mercedes	1:24.867	81
4	Sergio Perez	Force India	1:25.692	48
5	Marcus Ericsson	Sauber	1:25.734	49
6	Valtteri Bottas	Williams	1:25.872	56
7	Pascal Wehrlein	Manor	1:25.925	36
8	Jolyon Palmer	Renault	1:26.189	41
9	Esteban Gutierrez	Haas	1:26.931	32
10	Fernando Alonso	McLaren	1:27.198	71
11	Max Verstappen	Toro Rosso	1:27.346	59