Sebastian Vettel is hopeful for a few more laps on Saturday morning to complete the setup work he was conducting before Practice 2 was curtailed following the nasty crash for Romain Grosjean in Malaysia on Friday.
The Ferrari driver is targeting further improvement despite setting the fastest time of 1:31.261s in the dry afternoon session, which is a new lap record around the Sepang Circuit and had the four-time world champion six-tenths clear of teammate Kimi Raikkonen and eight-tenths ahead of Daniel Ricciardo in the Red Bull.
Commenting on how the day played out, Vettel said afterwards: “This morning we had a bit of mixed conditions and there was not so much running. This afternoon it was better. The car seemed to be quite okay right from the beginning of the session.”
Always aware of others that will almost certainly find more pace, however, the German was continuing to fine-tune his car into the ace simulation after his fastest time.
“[There is] still some things we must improve,” he said. “We tried something new, but unfortunately we couldn’t complete our programme as we had wished to because of the red flag.
“It’s only Friday, usually the day when you spend time trying various things on the car. We would have liked to drive a little bit more, but overall it was a decent afternoon. We have a good car and it’s up to us to make it work in all conditions.”
Further work will continue in the debrief for changes to make going into Saturday and Vettel hopes to find out more about those tweaks.
“We’ll see what we can do tomorrow,” he added.
What will have buoyed the 30-year-old was the problems at main rivals, Mercedes, with championship leader Lewis Hamilton only sixth fastest and almost 1.5 seconds slower in the afternoon.
Unsurprisingly, such a gap has led to some querying whether Vettel can take a significant bite into the 28-point deficit he now faces after his retirement in Singapore, but he is staying cool for now.
“If that’s the case, then yes, but it’s Friday afternoon,” he claimed. “Things can change. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
