SPIELBERG, Austria -- Sebastian Vettel said Ferrari did not have enough pace to threaten Mercedes during qualifying for the Austrian Grand Prix.
Before being hit with a grid penalty for impeding Renault's Carlos Sainz in qualifying, Vettel had qualified third for Sunday's race, 0.344s off the time which earned Valtteri Bottas pole position. Although he felt the gap could have been smaller he doubts he had enough pace in hand to get any closer to Bottas or championship rival Lewis Hamilton.
"I think there was a little bit more in me," Vettel said. "I had a tough start in Q3 I had an error, and it's not that easy to recover because I knew I needed to put a good lap in otherwise I start quite far back. But yeah, I don't think there was enough pace in hand to be a threat today. I think we need to make sure that we improve from where we are.
"It seems in qualifying, at least, we are a little bit behind right now. I think the tracks we went in the last two weeks are quite different so we need to make sure we keep pushing. For tomorrow I believe the car is stronger in relative pace in the race so it should be a close fight. We're starting again on a different tyre compound so let's see what we can do."
Explaining where he felt Mercedes held the edge, he said: "In the end it's very close anyway so it's not that many corners, but from what we've seen I think we are losing a little bit in sector one, and then mostly in sector three which Mercedes were very competitive, very quick in the second turn, turn seven.
"Then at the straights they were able to carry the speed through there. I think that's one of our main losses. I think the last two corners weren't too bad but you could see it was very high speed, turn seven, and yeah, turn nine, the second to last corner. It's close, we're not talking about much, but obviously enough to get ahead."