Vettel and Raikkonen in top three Friday practice for the Austrian GP

Spielberg  - Mixed fortunes for the Scuderia Ferrari drivers in the first free practice session for the Austrian Grand Prix, eighth round of the World Championship here at the Red Bull Ring.

Kimi Raikkonen had a trouble-free time, finishing third fastest with a 1.11.028, while Sebastian Vettel was sidelined after just four laps, with a transmission problem. Fastest was Nico Rosberg, who posted a 1.10.401 ahead of his Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton (1.10.709.)

In the second free practice session for the Austrian Grand Prix, the team concentrated on long runs looking ahead to the race. The weather forecast for Sunday is currently very different to the conditions expected for qualifying and this means it will be very complicated to select the best set-up, but the team acquired a lot of useful data.

Come the end of this afternoon’s 90 minute session, Sebastian Vettel was fastest with a 1.09.600. He stopped running 15 minutes before the end so the team could carry out some checks on his car. Behind the German came Nico Rosberg, who did a 1.09.611 in the Mercedes, while in the other SF15-T, Kimi Raikkonen was third with a 1.09.860.

Kimi Raikkonen: “It has been a good day of work, but it’s only Friday and it’s difficult to know where we are compared to our opponents: because of the layout of the track here all the cars are closer to each other. Unfortunately I could only run one lap with the Supersoft: I was going a bit fast and I ran wide, then I destroyed the right front tire by locking it. It was a pity, I would have preferred to do the long run with this compound.

I did it with the Soft compound and even if I was a bit stuck in traffic it was more or less ok. Now we have to wait and see what happens tomorrow. We have to make sure that everything works well, then start from there and do a good job over the weekend.”

Sebastian Vettel: “In the afternoon session we had a problem with the gearbox as one of the sensors went to the alert mode and we had to slow down. Obviously now we’ll have to take a close look at it: we don’t know what’s the problem yet, but it seems to be unrelated to the one we had this morning.

It’s always better if it happens in free practice rather than in qualifying or in the race, but we have to look into it and make sure it’s not happening again. In terms of feeling with the track, the lap is short and you just need to get into the rhythm.

Unfortunately we didn’t get as many laps as we wanted, but that’s what it is. Overall the pace looks fine, we’ve taken a lot of information from this session, which is good. We know that we have a good car and we think we are competitive, let’s see what’s happening overnight. We have to make sure that we stay with Mercedes as much as we can, it should be an interesting qualifying tomorrow.”

Scuderia Ferrari