Vettel continues form in Korea

F1 News
Date: 12/October/2012

Sebastian Vettel, winner of the last two F1 Grands Prix, continued his rich vein of form by leading the Friday practice timesheets in Korea.

Red Bull’s reigning double World Champion is now just four points behind Fernando Alonso and victory in Korea would put him both top of the standings and the first driver this year to claim four race wins.

The German star began the day with fifth place in morning practice, then led a Red Bull one-two by topping the quicker afternoon session by just 0.032s from tem-mate Mark Webber.

Vettel said: “So far so good, we have good information and the guys will now get on with the job tonight.

“We’ll have a look where we can improve; it’s always a compromise on a track like this with a bit of top speed in the first sector, then the last sector is pretty twisty.”

Red Bull technical director Adrian Newey added: “It’s a tale of two tracks here in as much as the first is very long straights. Engine power is important. And then you’ve got the rest of the lap, which is quite twiddly, so you can get quite big swings between the various sectors.”

Ferrari driver Alonso set the third fastest lap time in the afternoon, a mere 0.328s behind Vettel.

“It’s hard to say where we are compared to the others, because today, we focused mainly on ourselves, working this morning on various ideas relating to car configuration and, in the afternoon on the tyres,” said Alonso.

“We must wait until tomorrow to have a more precise picture of the situation. The track improved a great deal from one session to the next: it’s a phenomenon that’s particularly accentuated here, because there’s hardly any racing on this track and this morning, it was particularly dirty.”