Sebastian Vettel doesn’t think Mercedes broke much sweat in dominating the French Grand Prix at Paul Ricard.
Lewis Hamilton claimed the win by 18 seconds over teammate Valtteri Bottas, who had to overcome a last lap charge by Charles Leclerc to keep second.
However, it was the pace of the Briton which caught Vettel’s attention in particular, as he produced a blistering last lap on hard tyres to only miss out on the fastest lap point by 0.02s from the German who had pitted for softs.
“It just shows how much pace they have in hand,” he said post-race.
“If they want to they just go a lot faster. That means there is a lot of work for us, but we need to make sure to get closer to put them under pressure.”
In that bid, Ferrari had brought some upgrades to Le Castellet which they hoped would fix some of the understeer problems blighting their car.
Instead, however, most were taken off after practice, leading Vettel to describe the weekend in blunt terms.
“We failed,” he said. “We wanted to close the gap to Mercedes by a certain amount and we didn’t. In that regard we have to be honest, we failed, but, nevertheless we tried everything we could.
“Charles’ podium is at least a little bit of satisfaction,” he noted. “The bigger objective was to come here and close the gap but we had to learn that our parts weren’t working the way we expected them to.”
