Adam Cooper F1

Sebastian Vettel admits that he didn’t realise what a stir he’d caused by passing Mark Webber for the lead in Malaysia until he got back to the pits after the race.

Vettel apologised to Webber, but curiously he also claimed that he had not ignored the team orders “deliberately.”

However, team boss Christian Horner made it clear that the German knew exactly what was being asked of him.

“Towards the end I feel I had quite a strong pace,” said Vettel. “And obviously at the very end on a new set of medium tyres I had a bit more speed, and it was a close fight. But as you can see I’m not entirely happy. I think I did a big mistake today. I think we should have stayed in the positions that we were.

“I didn’t ignore it on purpose, but I messed up in that situation and obviously took the lead which, I can see now he’s upset, but yeah, I want to be honest at least and stick to the truth and apologise. I know that it doesn’t really help his feelings right now, but I think other than that, obviously a very good race for the team. We handled the tyres I think pretty well today. To sum it up, apologies to Mark, obviously now the result is there. but all I can say is that I didn’t do it deliberately.

“I think obviously we talk about these kind of things before we go into the race, and it’s not the first time we race each other. I think the difference in pace at the end probably wasn’t fair because he was trying to save the car and the tyres and, as I said, I did not ignore that but I should have been aware, to be honest. Obviously then took quite a lot of risk to pass him and that was the end of the race then.”

Asked to elaborate on how he hadn’t made the pass deliberately, he still didn’t have an adequate answer.

“I think it’s not an easy situation for me. Obviously I’m the black sheep right now. Obviously I put myself in that position so, as I said, all I can say is apologies to Mark. I know that right now, obviously, having just come out of the car, it’s probably difficult to explain everything, but the pass was deliberate. Obviously I wanted to pass him, you could see that, otherwise you wouldn’t even try, but I didn’t mean to ignore the strategy or the call. I made a mistake, simply.”

Christian Horner says that Sebastian Vettel has apologised to Mark Webber and Red Bull for disobeying team instructions in Malaysia.

Vettel was told to hold station immediately after coming out of the final pit stop behind his team mate, but instead continued to fight for the lead. Horner admitted that the situation was not ideal for the team.

“We’ve conducted a debrief and I’ve spoken to both drivers,” said Horner. “And Sebastian has apologised to both Mark and the team. So we’ve conducted our debrief as we usually do, and now we focus on the next race.

“At the end of the day in a situation like today you have a position from a team, which is clear, which is from our position to maximise the points from a team point of view from that last pit stop to the end of the race. From our point of view as soon as that pit stop was complete, Mark was ahead, it was very close on the pit exit, but as far as we were concerned it was a matter of managing the tyres to the end of the race. The tyres we’ve obviously been marginal with all weekend and last weekend, and the instruction was given to both cars effectively to hold position.

“At that point Sebastian has obviously chose to ignore that. The interests of a driver compared to the interests of a team are different, and he’s focussed on the eight point difference between a win and second, the team is focussed on the 43 points, and for us it didn’t matter which way round it finished, we just want to close the result off.

“Obviously it wasn’t right what he did, he accepts that. I think he’s clearly said if he could wind the clocks back he wouldn’t do it again. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it is. We need to put it behind us, we need to move on, it’s not like it hasn’t happened before, it’s not like it wasn’t happening just behind us.”

Horner has some sympathy with both drivers: “We employ these guys because they are competitive, because they do push each other, because they are very driven individuals. If either one was submissive to the other it’s not part of what we want in a racing driver. So of course it’s uncomfortable for the team, a situation like that. We managed to convert the 43 points, and it shouldn’t mar what was a fantastic team performance today.”

Horner said that Vettel told the team he hadn’t understood the position, although the team boss made it clear that he felt Vettel had chosen not to hear it.

“He felt that he hadn’t heard the call and it was unclear to him what the instruction was. But then again we had just the same in Brazil the other way round so these things happen.

“He’s obviously chosen to hear what he wants to hear. He’s a race driver, he’s hungry, he hasn’t achieved the championships that he has by not pushing the limits. He’s pushed that today with his team mate and his team.

“They’ve never been the best of mates, they’re never going to spend Christmas together, but there is a respect between the two of them, and I’m sure with a little bit of time to reflect, we’ll quickly move on from this.”

Asked if the team could have told Vettel to give the lead back, he said: “Do you honestly think if we’d told him to slow down and give the place back he would have slowed down and given it back? There’s no point. He’d made it quite clear what his intention was by making the move. He knew what the communication was, he had the communication, he chose to ignore it.

“He put his own interests beyond what the team’s position was, he was focussed on those eight points difference between second and first place. It was wrong and he’s accepted it was wrong.”

Ross Brawn says he has no regrets about not pitting Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg for fresh intermediates at the end of Q3, a strategy that helped to propel Sebastian Vettel and the two Ferraris to the head of the field.

Hamilton and Rosberg had to settle for fourth and sixth, having looked stronger earlier in the session.

“We’d obviously considered it before the session started,” said Brawn of the alternative strategy. “We’d seen some indications that the intermediate both held on and maybe even improved as it wore down, but I don’t think that seemed to be the case. It was as simple as that.”

Nevertheless Brawn says he’s happy with the way the Malaysian weekend has turned out thus far.

“I don’t think we were able to see the full potential of the cars in the dry, but I think we’re certainly top six in terms of our cars. So I think it’s a measure of where we are right now that we’re disappointed with fourth and sixth. Fourth and sixth would have been very welcome in the second half of last year, this year we’re a bit disappointed.

“We’re in that group. I don’t think we’re the fastest team, but we’ve made some encouraging progress, and we’ve got to keep pushing hard to keep progressing, because the pace of progress at the front is ferocious. We’re going to keep working hard to keep bringing new improvements to the cars.

“What will really count is where everyone is tomorrow, how they’re using their tyres, how they’re getting the most from them, good strategy, so on and so forth. The next measure will be tomorrow.”

Asked if he would be disappointed to still be fourth and sixth on Sunday, Ross said: “It would be OK. There are worse positions, and there are better positions. I think the drivers have worked really well this weekend, and the engineers have worked really well to have the car that we want to have. If that all comes together in the race, then fourth and sixth probably would be a bit of a disappointment.

“It’s difficult to speculate where we will end up, but we’re not in a bad place. We spent a lot of time getting the car dialled in for the race, and if that carries through – and it doesn’t always carry through, you get different conditions on a Sunday, and you suddenly find the car you tuned to heat the sweet spot doesn’t hit the sweet spot on Sunday. If it doesn’t then with these tyres, you can start to struggle. But if we carry that through, we should have a good race.”

Kimi Raikkonen has been handed a three-place penalty in Malaysia for impeding Nico Rosberg in qualifying.

Jenson Button now moves up to seventh, ahead of Adrian Sutil and Sergio Perez. Kimi will now start 10th, right in front of team mate Romain Grosjean.

“It got a  bit close in Turn 14,” said Rosberg. “They were on out laps, him and Sutil. So it was a bit close. The stewards have to judge if that was impeding or not.”

After getting comfortably into the top 1o in Malaysia Jenson Button says that McLaren has made progress with the MP4-28.

Button, who was as high as sixth in Q1, finished the damp Q3 session in eighth.

“Forgetting the wet conditions, I think we’ve improved from Australia,” he insisted. “I said yesterday that we’re competitive in these conditions, but today that wasn’t the case! I couldn’t find the balance in the wet.

“But anyway if you look through qualifying, in Q1 and Q2 on dry tyres, we were more competitive. Still nowhere near the top, but we were more competitive, and we should be very happy with what we’ve achieved so far this weekend. It’s only five days after a pretty tough race for us, so we’re making progress. And that’s very positive.”

Button has been saying he wanted a wet race, but he admits he’s changed his mind.

“After this, no I’m not. I couldn’t find a balance out there, and I struggled with lack of grip in high speed at the rear, lots of rear movement. Most of the time our car has been very good in the wet, but today it isn’t. I’d take that any day of the week for a better car in the dry.

“We’ve improved the car in the dry, which is good. It’s getting there. We’ve got a bit of work to do, and we lucked in with the rain in Q2 at the end, but tomorrow we’re looking forward to the race. I wasn’t really looking forward to the race in Melbourne.”

Christian Horner says that none of the teams have a proper handle on how to get the best out of Pirelli’s 2013 tyres.

However he says that it’s too early to suggest that the racing is too artificial.

“At the moment we’ve got one race as a reference,” he said. “Let’s see how this weekend pans out, and then we’ll start to get a clearer picture. But for sure you can see the tyres are quite fragile.

“You’ve only got to look at the slow motion shots here to see the amount of rubber that’s coming off them, even in a straight line, which is quite surprising. But then it’s the same tyre for everybody.

“I think the tyres for sure are a key, key role at the moment, and I think they’ll be a decisive factor here this weekend. It’s going to be a matter of finding that operating window that gives them performance and longevity.

“I think what we want to avoid is drivers driving around under the performance of their car, unable to follow another car closely. I think that’s what we desperately need to avoid – otherwise it’s not racing. It’s still early days, so let’s see a sample of two or three races, and we’ll be able to gauge from there. It doesn’t look like the situation is really too much different from the winter testing.”

In Australia Sebastian Vettel suffered greater degradation than team mate Mark Webber, which is not the usual pattern.

“Mark seemed to have better longevity with his tyre,” he said when asked about the race by this writer. “I think looking at Seb’s race, following Sutil did quite a bit of damage to the tyre. We were just not in the right operating window with Sebastian, who’s usually so good at managing the tyres. He was just powerless to be able to extend that stint length, and usually he’s the best in the business at that.”

As to whether it was frustrating to have a potentially fast car but not be able to use its performance, Horner said: “Obviously a quick car puts a little bit more energy into a tyre, you can see that in Melbourne, you can see that a little bit more here. For sure we’ve got a very good car, we’ve just got to work out how best to use these tyres. We’ve just got to work hard to understand that and get on top of it.

“I don’t think anybody up and down this pit lane fully understands these tyres, to be quite honest. I think if you can explain the different performances in different parts of the race, whether it be a Force India which was incredibly soft on a hard tyre and then killed a soft tyre, or the opposite way round for Mercedes, or Toro Rosso setting purple sectors, or Kimi Raikkonen setting fastest lap two laps from the end on a tyre that had done 20 laps… There were so many anomalies. A key aspect of this season is going to be getting on top of those tyre issues, and understanding them.”

Nick Fry will step down from his role as CEO of Mercedes at the beginning of April, the team confirmed today.

Recently Fry has been more focussed on sponsorship activities, and that will continue for the time being. The team says that he will “assist the team’s commercial operations as a consultant until at least the end of 2014,” adding that executive director Toto Wolff will take a greater role in the day-to-day running of the team.

Fry has been involved in the team since the BAR days, through the Honda and Brawn eras.

“I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to work with our team for the last 11 years and remain extremely proud of the fact that we took the team to its first race win and especially the double World Championship in 2009,” said Fry.

“Equally important is the success of our commercial activities as we have managed to gain the support of some of the most important companies in the world, thereby building a strong foundation for the future success of the team.

“I believe that Mercedes AMG Petronas offers the best sponsorship proposition in Formula One and I look forward to continuing to assist the team and its partners over the coming years.”

Sebastian Vettel says that Red Bull has to take steps to preserve its tyres after everyone suffered with their hards and mediums in Sepang today.

Vettel finished FP2 in second place, behind Kimi Raikkonen.

“We’ll see,” he said of the team’s prospects for the rest of the weekend. “I hope we have enough tyres to survive the race, tyre wear was obviously quite big today for everyone. Tomorrow is a different day. There could be some rain, and you saw how quickly things can change. It’s Malaysia.

“It’s a different place, different tyres. Today tyre wear was pretty severe for everyone. It’s not a lot of fun, but that’s how it is. We need to try a couple of things to make it better. We tried today. Hopefully we learned the right lessons and can make a step forward.

“This afternoon we couldn’t do that much because of the weather, which was a little bit disappointing.”

Meanwhile regarding the crossover between wet and dry tyres – always a big issue at Sepang – he said: “I think it was very exceptional today, one part was quite soaked, the other one pretty dry, so fairly quickly it dried up again. It was quite hot so it didn’t take a long time, considering the amount of rain. I think we had the number in our heads, but obviously it depends whether the whole circuit is wet, or just some corners.”

Sam Michael says that McLaren has a pretty good idea of what need to be changed on the struggling MP4-28 – but the Aussie admits that the team is still exploring every possible avenue.

“To be honest we’re looking at all fronts at the moment,” said Michael after FP1 in Malaysia today. “We have a pretty good understanding of where we think the issues are, and most of those things are things we have to solve in design back at MTC. However we get more and more confidence in knowing what to concentrate on by doing these track tests, because you can set-up certain tests to give you more information about how sensitive a particular area of the car is.

“And that’s what we’re in the middle of. At this point it’s too early to pinpoint externally that’s exactly what it is, even though we’ve got reasonable confidence of what to work on. Also internally you have to stay very open minded, because it normally comes through a sequence of different areas and gains. We’re open-minded at the moment even if we have a good idea of what it is.”

Michael didn’t want to target China or Bahrain as a venue for a step forward.

“As soon as possible really, it’s difficult to set a time frame. With these type of things you’re working through lots of different areas on the car, and you will inevitably uncover things as you go along, to know whether you can fix it for China or Bahrain, I can’t really say yet. We have a lot of people on it, everyone I should say is on it, and the focus is very much to get it sorted asap. There’s some very detailed understanding work going on on the problem.

“The other thing is that when you come out of the other side of this, although you never plan to have an experience like we’ve had now with this car, normally your understanding gets much deeper when you’ve had these problems, because you’re forced to look up every route to look for issues, and that improves your understanding.

“You normally learn a lot more in the face of adversity, as long as you come out the other side. The work that I’ve seen going on in the last weeks in the MTC it’s quite encouraging that we’ll get on top of the problem. I can’t give it a time frame at this moment.”

Asked by this blog how the team could have been surprised by the depth of its problems in Australia – given the simulation tools available – Michael said that the surprise was more the place in the pecking order.

“To be honest going to Melbourne based on the data we had and the pre-season running of the car, it was pretty close to what we thought it would be. The only thing you don’t know is you don’t know what other teams’ programmes are during the winter.

“You can’t really pinpoint the last few tenths. If you look at how close the grid is now, if you look at the pace of our car, in years gone by in the top three teams you could have the problems we’ve got with our car and you’d still qualify fifth and sixth. You’d get beaten by quite a bit but you’d still pick up a lot of points.

“You can’t do that anymore because the grid is so tight. To know exactly where you are for the those last few positions is not possible before you get to Melbourne. To know that we had an issue – of course we knew that before Melbourne, and that’s why a lot of the management and programmes that we put in place for Melbourne and here and future races was already underway.

“We had enough data to know we had an issue and we were not where we wanted to be, and not where we need to be. Melbourne was just final confirmation of suspicions that we already had.”

Fernando Alonso says that another podium finish in Malaysia this weekend will confirm that Ferrari is on target with the F138.

A year ago Alonso won in Malaysia, but only after rain handed him a chance to flatter the troubled F2012.

“There is no comparison with last year, we were coming here out of Q3, and nowhere near where we wanted to be,” he said. “This year is a little bit better in this aspect. We have a more or less competitive car, and in Australia everything worked quite fine for us, and we showed a good potential. It’s true that in Australia strategy was very, very strange, a very unusual circuit, so this weekend for us is a little bit of confirmation.

“We need to confirm that the car is performing well after some positive feelings in the winter, and some positive feelings in Australia. This is a very real test for us, and we want a clear weekend and hopefully a good result. A podium will be again a very good target to achieve, and if we do so, I think we can be very, very happy.”

Alonso has not won a race since Germany in July last year: “It’s not frustrating at the moment. If I have the best car on the grid and I do six pole positions and I finish second every race, it will be frustrating. If we are outside the top five in the qualifying and we finish in the podium always, then I’m very proud.”

He says he was not fazed by Kimi Raikkonen’s performance in Australia.

“I think the pace of the Lotus was very good, but nothing we could not do. I think they had a very clean race, with no traffic, good strategy, but the pace was nothing out of reach. I think here we can fight a little bit closer.”