It was a case of sweet and sour for the Scuderia Ferrari team in Malaysia on Saturday afternoon when Kimi Raikkonen showed the cars true potential by securing P2 on the grid after a hard-fought battle with the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton, who eventually claimed his 70th pole position.
However, for his Scuderia Ferrari teammate, Sebastian Vettel, things couldn't have gone any more wrong.
The German driver suffered issues at the end of FP3 and the team new fitted a new V6 engine to his SF70 after P3 for precautionary reasons. This engine came complete with parts which had been run before and were factory-proven and they did a remarkable job to get it done in the two hour time frame between sessions.
However, when Sebastian went out for his installation lap in Q1, the four time world champion was unable to set a time due to a problem which prevented the compressor from feeding air to the engine properly.
Therefore, he will start the Malaysian Grand Prix from last on the grid, nevertheless, he is determined to fight to the end…
“Straight away I understood there was something wrong” said Seb. “Today we had decided to change the engine after P3, then I went out and everything seemed to work, but during the flying lap in turn 5, I suddenly felt like I was losing power. I was lucky to limp back to the garage so that we could have a look. Unfortunately, we couldn't fix the problem.”
“We tried to find the issue when we took the engine cover off, but we couldn't find anything wrong. So, we decided to fire it up and see if we could drive again. As soon as the engine was running, we could see the issue was still there.”
“It's a shame because the car is quick, but tomorrow we should be able to fight back. I don't have expectations in terms of numbers, but anything can happen and that's why we race. I want to be sure we can achieve our best. We need to know why we got the issue today and make sure it won't happen again. This kind of thing can happen in our sport, but the race is tomorrow. We need to be positive”.
