“I was sleeping a bit” – Vettel explains his spin

2015 F1 season

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Sebastian Vettel accepted the blame for his spin at the beginning of today’s test session.

Vettel put his Ferrari in a gravel trap early at the beginning of the test, causing the session to be red-flagged.

“This morning I was sleeping a bit and, coming out of the pits on cold tyres, I spun,” he explained. “The least I could do was help the guys clean all the gravel out of the car.”

However once he returned to the track Vettel had a productive day, completing over 100 laps of the Circuit de Catalunya. “We worked mainly on reliability, doing a good number of laps,” he said.

Although the car has run consistently, Vettel says he is not yet sure how competitive it will be. “We are managing to run without too many problems,” he said, “but it’s really hard to tell where we are compared to the others.”

“In general, both me and Kimi [Raikkonen] are pleased with the way it handles, but there’s still a lot to do.”

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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28 comments on ““I was sleeping a bit” – Vettel explains his spin”

  1. Is that just a figure of speech or was he actually dozing off!? In a formula 1 car!?

  2. Must have been a bit awkward for him, but nothing more you can do than take the blame and get on with it. Pretty solid day in the end.

    1. I can respect the drivers that just put their hand up and say “my fault, i goofed” way more than the guys that are looking for excuses or trying to blame everyone else.

      1. I agree. It’s probably harder if you are fighting for your place in F1 to admit fault though. But I guess it’s a pressure they need to overcome.

  3. I’m not a Vettel fan but I do admire him for doing stuff like accepting the blame for it and helping them clean the car.

    1. @verstappengp Its nice to see comments like this. Vettel has always been eager to please and to fit in, from day 1, not just with Ferrari, or RBR, but even Williams and Torro Rosso. From all the articles I’ve read over the years, this isn’t just some token gesture from him, this is an accurate behind the scenes look at Vettel, who is a very nice kid…

      1. When I met him in person, I was really surprised by humble and nice he is.

      2. Vettel is my favourite personality in F1 currently, I love that he has a good sense of humour and is really humble. I imagine it is probably hard to be humble when you’ve had his career but he is. I really want him to do well at Ferrari, and it seems like the ‘fresh start’ is definitely helping him leant to re love F1.

        1. He’s my favourite as well. I am hoping he can shine through in the next few seasons and show he was not just a lucky lad in the best car, as plenty of ‘fans’ are saying.

          I wonder what it will be like when the best friends meet in anger on track. “Yes yes yes, leave me alone” “No way”

          1. Both of them are really easy going, as we saw on Hungary 2013.

            But if Kimi is the guy who just wants to drive, Vettel talks to the team a lot. He is number one there as he was on Red Bull, and sooner or later he will ask the team to “take Kimi out of the way, he is too slow” and how Kimi will react.

          2. I would love to see Ferrari go the Merc route and just let them race if it came to it. But I feel like Ferrari have made it clear to Kimi what his position on the team is. Plus Kimi gets along with Seb, has maybe 2 years left in him, plus a kid now. I don’t think he is gonna have a problem with being #2 and making a boat load of money for the next 2 years.

        2. @williamstuart I do definitely think now that he has moved on into a different stage in his career he deserves a fresh start and a chance to become more liked by fans.

          He has a personality which definitely has two sides to it. On one side, definitely the one we see more often, there is a funny, pleasant guy who loves what he is doing, but then on the reverse there has been some arrogance.

          Hopefully we will see a lot more of the first one :)

  4. Ferrari came back to earth today. Vettel did good long runs, but Kvyat’s looked as good and longer, so i believe Red Bull, now with their reliability mostly solved, is probably ahead together with Williams and Mercedes.

    But not by much, in case of Red Bull and Williams.

    1. I’m unsure about Williams, of all the teams I want them to do best, but the lack of news coming from them is worrying me. Obviously it could be a good thing, but maybe they’re so average no one wants to report news on them. Yeah, Ferrari were never going to be as competitive as they seemed earlier after last season, but even if they can battle for podiums then they’re making progress.

      1. Williams certainly aren’t standing out.

        I personally do see this as a good thing. We would hear if they had major problems like McLaren, and we know they have the Mercedes power unit, which is very good, and they had a decent chassis last year too, and if this year’s is an evolution (which it appears to be), then they should be on track (rather than stuck in the gravel).

        Ferrari and Sauber obviously had a disastrous year, hence why we are hearing a lot about them, Honda are all over the headlines for obvious reasons, and Red Bull seem to be in a good situation and all we have really heard from them is about their livery, so I’m not too worried at this stage.

  5. Its looking like that this year may shape up to be a more solid year, in terms of reliability, across the board. Except for maybe McLaren with the new Honda power plant. I’m not suggesting that all the cars will finish every race, but, I think we’ll see less of Renault/Ferrari stopping suddenly on track with engine related issues. I think this is good for us, and means that we’ll get to see more of our favourite drivers battle it out for longer.

    1. To be fair, the works Ferrari was actually more reliable than the works Mercedes last year – Ferrari retired from 2 races with technical failures (Alonso at Monza and Japan), while Mercedes essentially had 5 race-ending failures (Hamilton in Australia and Canada, Rosberg at Silverstone, Singapore and let’s be honest Abu Dhabi) as well as 2 failures in qualifying (Hamilton at Germany and Hungary). Plus Mercedes had frequent reliability issues in practice. Red Bull had 4 race-ending technical failures (one for Ricciardo, three for Vettel).

      Although purely in terms of the engine, Mercedes teams were more reliable on whole than Ferrari and much more reliable than Renault.

      1. I’d throw Rosberg at Canada in there too. I know he finished, but his car was a damn mess by the end of that race.

  6. Thought Vettel had enough time to sleep last season, given his performance.
    But clearly I was wrong.

  7. Not quite on topic, but I think this is the prettiest Ferrari in several years.

    1. Since 2011, which is one of my favorites.

    2. Agreed. It is a great looking car.

    3. 2013 F138 is one of my all time favorites. Come on, it was a really sexy car. I’m not sure about the new one yet, it’s something about the nose that unsettles me…

  8. He was sleeping. That’s the kind of answer ai would expect from Kimi, not Seb.

  9. How embarrassing!
    I think Sebastian is unreasonably disliked by many and I hope this change of teams can make people think again. I am definately looking at him in a more positive way since he announced he was joining the Scuderia.
    I cannot ever accept that he is a better driver and others who have won less world championships than him but have put that aside.
    I have read that Kimi is a lot more communicative than he has previously been this year. Interesting.
    Hoping for a better year for Ferarri.

    1. I think the “embarrassing” thing is the relentless double standard of F1 “fans” and much of the press. Hamilton spun off in Jerez and nothing was made of it. Certainly nobody was demanding to know if Lewis “accepted the blame”!

  10. I’ve always considered Vettel as a solid driver but being a Ferrari fan for all my life, i really wasn’t able to root for him. So now that he’s wearing the color of the team which i’m a huge fan, i’m definitely excited.
    Given the rough year the Scuderia had in 2014, i just hope that the team performs much better, and i’m trying not to overhype the results of this tests (though i can admit, it looks quite promising)

    1. Mashiat Lam Gofran
      22nd February 2015, 4:56

      I hate to spoil your party (don’t worry, I’ve been there for five seasons while FA was there), but the Ferrari seems to be slower than the Mercedes, Red Bull and Williams. When both Kvyat and Vettel did their long runs yesterday, Kvyat was marginally quicker and ran longer so…

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