Sebastian Vettel went through a see-sawing Friday in Abu Dhabi, as FP1 saw him spin and hit the barriers at Turn 19.

The German labelled the incident as “surprising”, since he declared he was not expecting the mistake to cause any damage to the car.
“It was a bit of a surprise, -he said- it was a bit unfortunate but there was no damage other than the rear wing”.

As for Ferrari’s competitiveness in Abu Dhabi, Vettel reckoned the SF90 suffers in the third sector and delved into the weaknesses of the car, starting with understeer and sheer speed.

“We’re pretty much fighting the same things as the last couple of races, this medium-low speed type of corners where we are lacking speed compared to the others. I think sector three is what really hurts us”.

“We struggle with the tyre getting hot and the car being difficult to drive, but I’m sure that as soon as you drive your car on the limit, any car would be more difficult to drive. But I’m sure we can improve the set-up from where we are.“

Going back to his clash with Leclerc in Brazil, Vettel suggests that the pairing has moved on following some post-race discussions in Maranello. The four-time world champion also stressed what is key to establish a constructive and calm relationship with his teammate.

“We’re not in Brazil now. I don’t think there is so much more to understand. We are both not happy with the outcome, obviously we did not finish the race. But we’re grown up, we spoke to each other, we spoke with Mattia. We tried to go through as much as we can and we try to move on and it’s clear we want to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

“The key for me is that we get along and we don’t have a problem there are no problems.
There is nothing to worry about from the inside. If we race each other we need to give each other in that regard more room to make sure that we don’t touch.”