Mark Webber: “It’s a pretty tough car to work on…”

Although his car was not changed as much as Sebastian Vettel’s, Mark Webber says his mechanics also had a late night on Friday, finishing at 0330 after the team broke the FIA curfew.

Webber made some intriguing comments about the serviceability of Adrian Newey’s RB7.

“People think we’re re-inventing the whole car, but it’s a pretty tough car to work on,” he said. “Even pretty small changes take a long period of time. That’s all you can read into that. When you start to make some reasonable changes it takes the guys quite a long period to do that.”

Webber said he was not worried that Vettel’s car had changes that his didn’t get.

“The decision for Sebastian to change rear suspension was done very, very late last night. I’d already left the track. I don’t have a problem with that. Obviously that was a call that was made. It wasn’t really on the radar to do it, to be honest.”

Meanwhile Webber will start the Hungarian GP from sixth position after a disastrous first sector of his crucial lap.

The Aussie suffered KERS problems in qualifying, but got it back for his final lap. However when he used it at the start of the lap he managed to fail to activate DRS. He didn’t realise immediately as his speed was the same as before, the gain of one ‘boost’ having in effect cancelled out the loss of the other.

To make matters worse his tyres weren’t quite up to temperature as his out lap wasn’t as fast as intended, as he was behind Jenson Button – whose car did not need to run as fast to get the tyres into the right operating window.

“It wasn’t the smoothest session,” said Webber. “Basically if you look at the last lap, which was the most important lap because it was the only lap I had KERS for, I was very optimistic that I could do a pretty good job. The problems started really on the out lap, because the McLaren’s out lap was like the old Jaguar out laps, just tootling around. They just cruise, and they can go bang, and they have temperature and away.

“We need more pace than that. I couldn’t go any quicker, because JB wouldn’t let me pass. Which is fair enough, that’s all fair game, I don’t have a problem with that. I’d do the same thing if I had to do an out lap like that. And I was also mindful of the fact that there wasn’t a huge amount of time left in the session, I had to keep an eye on that.

“It was my first lap onto the start/finish with KERS and DRS, it looks like I activated the DRS early and it didn’t respond, so I did the whole straight without DRS. The rolling split I didn’t notice that I didn’t have the DRS open because I used the KERS, so the rolling split didn’t look bad compared with my previous lap, because I had the KERS. That in combination with JB, my first sector was a complete disaster. From Turn 5 the lap I did was identical to Sebastian.”