Adam Cooper F1

Sebastian Vettel was a low-key fifth in afternoon practice in Monaco this afternoon, having topped the slower session in the morning.

“I had a good feeling straight away, brushed the wall after three laps, so I don’t have to do it again this week!,” said Vettel. “It’s fun around here, it’s a different track, very bumpy, very rough. Some places of the track they resurfaced, but I don’t think they made it any better, or any worse.

“It’s interesting. Ferrari look very competitive, all in all, everyone is really close to each other. We’ve got Nico up there with the Mercedes, both McLaren drivers, so it’s tight. Not only to find your way without brushing the wall, but also to find your preferred grid slot.”

Vettel is happy with the way his DRS is working: “You cannot use it as aggressively probably as in other places, also the straightlines here are very short, so it doesn’t make a lot of difference in some places, but surely the big straight lines you are using it as everywhere else. I think it was a very good idea not to put us to any risk in the tunnel.”

Vettel did a lot of laps on the supersoft and has no concerns about it.

“I think not bad, positive so far, both tyres are working, that’s most important, and lasting pretty well. We’ll see how conditions are on Sunday. I think similar today. The supersoft seems to be the preferred tyre for qualy, you can be quicker, you can extract more lap time out of it. We’ll see. No drama today, I would say.”

Lewis Hamilton was buzzing after practice in Monaco today, enjoying the challenge of the track and encouraged by his second place.

The McLaren driver was 0.1 shy of pacesetter Fernando Alonso, and admitted he lost a little bit in a couple of slower corners with a balance issue.

“It is fantastic,” said Hamilton. “I love it here, I love the track, just been so excited all day. I think that the circuit is fantastic, look at this weather! This is just a beautiful place to be, I had a great evening yesterday, and now I’m very, very happy.

“Obviously just driving the track today I kept it out of trouble. I’m quite happy with the balance of the car, and comfortable with our high fuel run as well. It’s going to be close though, the Red Bull looks fast, the Ferrari looks fast. I’m pushing, I’m pushing, I’m pushing. I want to win this Grand Prix!”

He said he had no problems with the DRS and KERS.

“With KERS and DRS you just get really used to it, so out of Turn One, you’re on it. Going across the startline, you’re on it. Every little chance you get, you’re on it. But you’re only really on it for say for the main straight and up the hill, then the in between parts you don’t touch it at all, then you don’t touch it again until you come back, so you only really use it twice. Maybe for qualifying I’ll try a fw more places. But I’ll keep that in my pocket.”

Lewis says he’s happy with the supersoft tyre. “It really doesn’t look bad, to be honest. You look at the long run of Vettel, for example, 20 laps, no problem. We might see a different race here. Maybe it won’t be as spectacular as we had hoped, but I’m sure some people will have more degradation than others.

“The tyres seem to last quite long, both tyres, the degradation is quite low. I think you’ll see people doing 20 plus laps on each stint, which is different from other circuits.”

Last year’s Monaco winner Mark Webber didn’t complete a flying lap on Thursday morning after being struck by a gearbox problem right at the start of he session.

Inevitably that meant he had a lot of catching up to do in the afternoon, when he was a modest eighth.

“Not too bad,” said Webber of his day. “It was always going to be the case that you were a little bit behind in that session. Still a lot of good information. It’s easy to go out there and not panic but try and get to where you should be and make even more mistakes. We’ve got the information, a lot of stuff to go through, and day to go through it tomorrow as well. We should be alright.”

Pressed on whether he behind everyone else, he was more forthright.

“Of course we are. We missed 40 laps this morning. We’re not going to get that back overnight, so we need to get back in the groove a little bit on Saturday morning, then hopefully we can do the business on Saturday afternoon. And that will recover your weekend.”

Webber didn’t have much to say about the new supersoft tyre: “Yeah, it was alright, similar to all the Pirellis, really…”

Lewis Hamilton has added an intriguing dimension to the debate over blown diffusers by talking about engine downforce settings – a phrase that, while perhaps familiar within the top teams, has not previously been uttered in public.

Lewis was talking about the buzz of going for pole in Monaco when he dropped into the conversation.

“Qualifying is probably the most exciting part of the weekend, apart from the start of the race,” he said. “Qualifying is very cool. Especially nowadays when they switch… Before we’d just go to the fastest engine setting, now you go for the fastest, most powerful downforce setting from the engine, which is very, very neat. You put lots of front wing in, you also have loads more grip, and you can throw the car around like crazy. I can’t wait to get into qualifying.”

Regarding Red Bull’s qualifying pace, Hamilton said: “Through the last corner of Barcelona, through Turn 3, they were flat out, in a lot of locations, particularly in qualifying. When we get to qualifying we can only generally do the corner at a similar speed as we can do it in the race. In qualifying they can do it flat out, and we can’t do that, so that’s a massive amount of time they gain.

“They were the first ones to go with the blown diffuser, just like when the Brawns were the first to do the double diffuser, they had the advantage for a long period of time. These are now the first to have done the blown diffuser, and everyone’s playing catch-up.”

Michael Schumacher had an interesting response when told that Lewis Hamilton felt that he had interfered in the lead battle in Spain by letting Vettel through and making life hard for the McLaren driver.

“I don’t recall it,” he said. “And I don’t think it would make sense because I think I have a lot more… although Seb is my friend, but then Lewis is running a Mercedes engine and that’s obviously a lot more important to me, not that I try to favour or not favour anybody. No, that certainly must have been a misunderstanding, but not my idea. I try to keep out of everybody’s way and just do my own thing…”

Meanwhile Schumacher says that he has no idea how competitive Mercedes will be in Monaco, but believes that the way races have worked this year will give him a chance to make progress.

“Due to very different strategies that we apply this year compared to probably previous years. From my point of view I have absolutely no sort of feeling and understanding whether our car may suit this track any better than other tracks so it is going to be completely open.

“Tyres will certainly be the most important factor but I think if you have the right tyre and the right situation in place then it will normally help you. I have at least good memories when in one race I started last [2006] and went forward. So overtaking is a chance, yes it’s difficult, it is a challenge but it’s not impossible, and it’s certainly an extra help.”

Asked about what his first Monaco win had meant, Schumacher said: “It was 1994 and that was after the tragedy that we had in Imola. It was still with us in these moments so naturally emotions were a bit low. Nevertheless as I said at the beginning it is the most prestigious race you can win.

“In qualifying I just had a fantastic lap. It was spot on and that is a big thrill and if you can repeat this in the race, although we had a certain margin I think and I was relatively easy up front, so then you don’t have to but it is the ultimate accomplishment you can have from a race over here, no doubt. Has it changed something to me? I put myself into the record of being in a winner in Monaco and then it is all focussed for the championship and it is just a single event.”

Sebastian Vettel says it would be a ‘huge honour’ to join the list of Monaco GP winners this weekend.

One of the few drivers with an appreciation of the sport’s history, Vettel said he would be happy to add the Monaco trophy to his growing collection.

“I wouldn’t mind!,” he joked today. “It’s a nice Grand Prix, I think we all enjoy coming here, seeing it from a spectator’s point of view it’s a nice thrill, you can get very close to the cars.

“There’s just so many things different, and obviously the history of the Grand Prix here and the tradition is huge, and it would be a huge honour to put your name down on the list of winners around here. We’ll see. But on the other hand it’s a long race, a lot of crazy things happened here already. I think you can never be too sure at any time, really.”

While the emphasis in Monaco has always been on getting pole, Vettel conceded that this year’s tyre situation has complicated things.

“I think it always has been very important to make sure you start from the front. Surely overtaking is not very popular round here, it’s very tight, there’s not a lot of space. The higher up you qualify on Sunday surely the better your chances are on Sunday.

“I think we’ve seen crazy races with a lot of things happening this year with the tyres, we don’t know yet what to expect here, how many stops. For sure you want this to give you the flexibility probably to try something, whereas in the past usually it was a one-stop race, or maybe a two-stop.

“I don’t know how many stops we’ll have this weekend, it’s very hard to judge the supersoft performance, so we’ll see where we are tomorrow.”

The FIA is set to introduce a ‘three strikes’ rule by the British GP to ensure that reprimands for drivers are no longer meaningless, this blog can reveal.

Last weekend in Spain Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button and Mark Webber all escaped with reprimands for going too quickly under yellows at the scene of Heikki Kovalainen’s accident.

When such penalties are handed out rivals often complain that they have no value, and thus are of little deterrent to those involved.

Now if a driver gets three reprimands in a season he will be handed a five-place grid penalty.

At least two of the offences must involve driving, as in theory reprimands can also be handed out for being late for the official drivers’ briefing or FIA press conference. Unusually, Paul di Resta received one for missing a weight check in Turkey.

The new system has been discussed by the FIA’s Sporting Working Group and now has to be passed by the F1 Commission and then signed off by the World Motor Sport Council, which is expected to be a formality.

If it is approved, it will be in operation from Silverstone onwards. In the interests of fairness previous reprimands earned this season will be forgotten, and everyone will start from zero.

Ferrari’s erstwhile technical director Aldo Costa has lost the job in the latest Maranello reshuffle.

He has been moved aside to take on ‘new responsibilities,’ the phrase usually used by the company when a key race team member has been found wanting.

A short statement said: “Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro announces that, as from today, Aldo Costa relinquishes his current position as Technical Director to take on new responsibilities within the Company.

“At the same time, the technical activity has been restructured in three areas: Director for the Chassis side is Pat Fry, Production is in the hands of Corrado Lanzone, while Engine and Electronics continues with Luca Marmorini. All three report directly to the Team Principal, Stefano Domenicali.”

The FIA has agreed with the views of the majority of F1 drivers and decided not allow DRS to be operable in the Monaco tunnel.

Charlie Whiting wrote to the teams today confirming the decision, and also forwarded a copy to the Grand Prix Drivers Association.

Although the race DRS zone is on the pit straight, drivers would have been able to use it in practice and qualifying through the tunnel and on the run down to the chicane.

The feeling among the drivers was that there were too many risks involved given the high speed and very tight nature of that part of the track, and that the teams would inevitably pressure them to push the limits of DRS usage.

The matter was discussed in Friday’s drivers’ meeting in Barcelona – where they again said that they didn’t want to use it all in Monaco – and Whiting told them that he would give it further consideration.

The FIA was swayed by the fact that there have been instances this season of drivers ‘getting out of synch’ on a busy lap and having the wing open when they thought it was closed. While that hasn’t much of an issue on the traditional tracks we’ve been to up until now, it was thought that the margins in the tunnel were too small to take any risks.

The FIA had originally argued that it would simply be up to the drivers to judge when to use it, as they have done at every other track this year.

That viewpoint was shared by Renault team boss Eric Boullier: “My own view is that the drivers will build up their confidence gradually during free practise and by the time qualifying arrives they will know in how much of the tunnel they can safely use the DRS wing.

“Often in the past the tunnel has been very tricky to take flat out at the start of the race weekend when the track is poor. This has not caused the drivers to crash, they have simply built up their pace gradually until they were confident that it could be taken flat – I think the same approach will emerge with the DRS.”

Ferrari boss Stefano Domenicali admits that Ferrari was simply not on the pace in Spain today, but says that it’s too early to write off the team’s title challenge.

Ferrari has until now showed good race pace, and he’s hoping that the move to the supersoft tyres over the next two races will help to give the team a boost.

“We need to be very cautious,” said Domenicali. “We have seen so many different things happening in the first couple of races since the beginning that it’s difficult to make a judgement at the moment. For sure what we have seen today was expected, where here unfortunately in the condition where the car needs to have the maximum downforce – and we know we don’t have it – we had a multiplied effect on the tyres, above all on the hard, because we were not able to let them work.

“If you think that Fernando was leading for 20 laps more or less, in 46 laps [after that] we were lapped, so we were losing about 3 seconds a lap. So you can understand that it was really difficult to explain from a pure performance point of view.”

Domenicali said that Ferrari simply couldn’t get the hard tyres to work.

“Unfortunately with this kind of condition, with this kind of cars, these tyres were not able to work on our cars. The cars were sliding around, and you’re not putting in temperature. Three seconds is a lot, as you can imagine.

“I have to say this was the worst race we’ve had since the beginning in terms of race pace. Because the last couple of races we were pretty quick, and for sure it’s a shame. But we have seen that things are so changeable. For sure the tyre effect has a big influence.

“We will need to see where we will be the next couple of Grands Prix, because we will have a much softer tyre, and a different configuration of track, and then we will see where we are. Of course fighting for the championship, we know that it is difficult, but we don’t give up.”