Sebastian Vettel accepts Ferrari head into the weekend behind Mercedes after Friday practice at the British Grand Prix.
The four-time champion ended fourth fastest overall, almost 0.5s slower than pacesetter Valtteri Bottas and 0.25s behind teammate Charles Leclerc.
And, reflecting on his pace, revealed there was still some decisions to be made on the set-up direction after a day of experimenting.
“I’m not entirely happy,” Vettel said via Crash.net. “I think it was a tricky afternoon, we tried a couple of things, maybe some of them we will go back – now we have a bit of time to think about it.
“I think the bigger picture today it was okay, too many jumps for us up and down, still Mercedes looked very, very fast and the ones to beat so we’ll see where we’ll be.
“Hopefully tomorrow we’ll do a significant step.”
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While single lap pace looked quite close, during the race simulation, Mercedes enjoyed a comfortable advantage while Ferrari struggled with tyre wear.
And Leclerc was pretty pessimistic about the team’s outlook.
“I think Mercedes have probably quite a bit more to come. We’ll see tomorrow, quite a lot of work to do,” he stated.
“To be honest on my side I expected Mercedes to be the team to beat this weekend and they confirmed that today that they are the team to beat this weekend, very very quick during race pace.
“We need to work, we struggled a lot on race runs, a bit less in qualifying runs, but still pace to find from our side.”