Vettel: Ferrari yet to find "sweet spot" in China F1 practice 

Sebastian Vettel admits he is yet to find the “sweet spot” in his Ferrari Formula 1 car following Friday practice for the Chinese Grand Prix. 

Vettel heads into this weekend with a 17-point championship lead over Lewis Hamilton after making a perfect start to the new season with back-to-back wins in Australia and Bahrain. 

Despite not being entirely happy with his car’s balance in Australia, the German profited from a fortunately-timed Virtual Safety Car period to leapfrog teammate Kimi Raikkonen and Hamilton on his way to winning the season-opener in Melbourne, before demonstrating supreme tyre-management to hold off a late charge from Valtteri Bottas in Sakhir. 

But after ending up with the sixth (FP1) and fourth (FP2) fastest times in Shanghai practice on Friday, the four-time world champion insisted he has work to do in order to get the maximum out of his Ferrari package in time for qualifying.

“In Bahrain I was a lot happier but here is not yet where we want to be. We are still looking and if anybody has any clever suggestions they’re welcome! I think as I said it’s difficult to find the sweet spot, but if you do then you can unleash the pace. 

“I think the car has the pace but we need to make sure we get it to work and today was mixed. I think in the afternoon was a bit better, I was a bit happier but hopefully tomorrow I am very happy.”

Raikkonen was once again the fastest Ferrari driver on a Friday in 2018, ending second practice just 0.007s shy of pacesetter Hamilton. The Finn said he could have extracted more time out of his qualifying simulation run had he not encountered traffic on what turned out to be his best lap.

“It was OK. I think we had some traffic and for sure we could go faster [over] one lap. Obviously on the long run we never really got good idea where we are with the conditions and we’ll see what happens tomorrow.”