Sebastian Vettel kept his World Championship lead by salvaging fourth after a below par race for Red Bull in Spain, but afterwards the German could not disguise his frustration about the role of tyres in 2013.
Pirelli has since confirmed that it is making more changes, but on Sunday Vettel was keen to point out that the revised hard introduced in Spain didn’t help RBR.
“I think obviously there were three people that did better today, and we need to catch up,” he said. “Surely we’re not going the pace of the car, we’re going the pace of the tyres.”
Vettel downplayed the suggestion that by going for four stops winner Alonso was able to push throughout with no apparent concern for the tyres. RBR also switched Seb to four in response.
“You can’t push for 15 laps or 20, in the end it doesn’t make a big difference, the question is whether you can reach 20 laps or 15. I think for us at the beginning we were trying to do it on three stops, but we had to admit that tyre wear was too big for us today, and we couldn’t stay with the cars ahead.
“I think we knew pretty much before the race that it was three or four stops. In the end we expected a little bit more from the new hard tyre, which didn’t help us at all.”
Adam Cooper F1 
Alonso was miles faster than everyone else! According to a race analysis on TheJudge13 if he 4 stopped he might have made the podium. Apparently Kimi was the only other person in the race…