Business as usual for Vettel on Friday

Sebastian Vettel insists it was just another Friday at Silverstone despite both Ferraris splitting the Mercedes cars in free practice two.

Kimi Räikkönen was the fastest Ferrari during the morning practice session, but his best time was more than 1.3 seconds off the pace and good enough only for P4.

The afternoon session proved more fruitful for the Scuderia, with Räikkönen leading Vettel three-four on the timesheet, the pair three tenths of a second behind Nico Rosberg’s headline time and a further one tenth of a second up the road from Lewis Hamilton.

Though Vettel remained cautious, he claimed there would be more to come from Ferrari on Saturday.

“I’m not entirely happy yet with how the car feels, but I think for tomorrow we can take a step forward,” said the German. “We didn’t have any issues with the car, so we more or less got through everything we wanted to do.

“This track is a lot about finding the rhythm, so it was good to do a couple of laps.

“I think we can improve. We tried a couple of things, now we have to find out what was good, what was bad, and put the good things in the car tomorrow.”

Ferrari team principal slammed his team last week for putting in “fake” Friday performance that created false hope for ambitious results come race day after a string of unnaturally positive practice results failed to translate into points.

“I said to the engineers that it’s better to go on Friday with a full tank so we can see a correct comparison instead of seeing a fake one,” said the team boss.

With Friday’s results again looking positive for Ferrari, Vettel remained circumspect when asked why Ferrari was able to prevent the Mercedes duo from completing the expected top two lockout.

“I don’t know what happened to them,” he said. “But I think you saw their pace in general in the long runs and this morning, so they will be quick no matter what.

“Anything else would be a surprise, but if we can repeat it tomorrow, that would be good news.

“I think tomorrow they will be very quick. We know that they do a massive step from Friday to Saturday, and it’s only Friday.

“There’s a lot of work in front of us. We’ll focus on ourselves and try to get the best together for tomorrow.”