Vettal Penalized Again!

By Andrew Cutler
October 7 2007

First of all, I feel that an explaination is in order. I had this story written and was in the process of trying to upload it to SN over ten hours ago when it 'disappeared', along with my ability to reconnect to SN, & it has been that way ever since until sometime within the last hour.

So it's not my fault that this story is late: ITS THEIRS!

Anyways... (rant over)

Tonio & Sebastian put in a much better showing in the Saturday morning practice session than they did during either of the Friday sessions. Tonio would place 12th on the time charts with a best lap at 1:37.463, & Sebastian would place 16th with a lap at 1:37.759.

Qualifying would also look impressive for the boys. Tonio would do well enough to grab the 11th slot on the grid, just missing out on the Q3 session, with Sebastian alongside in the 12th spot. Then came the news that Vettel was being docked ten spots for impeeding the qualifying efforts of Renault driver Heikki Kovalainen.

Here are their post Qualifying session comments, taken before the team was aware of Vettel's penalty:

Tonio Liuzzi

“Overall a good qualifying and I think the whole team can be proud of this result achieved in dry conditions. Yesterday went well and this morning, we worked hard on getting the best set-up possible, always thinking that we might have a wet race tomorrow. In Q1, I had a bit of traffic so I could not get the best out of the car, but we still made it safely to Q2. Maybe I could have done a little bit better if I had made my run later as I had some understeer, but to be eleventh, so close to Q3 means we have done a good job.”

Sebastian Vettel

“This performance was better than we expected. It is a very good result for the whole team. There was not much between us: in Q1 I was slightly ahead of Tonio and in Q2, he was quicker. The key thing is that we managed to lap consistently. I only missed out on Q3 by a little margin, so this is clearly an improvement over yesterday and shows we are quite competitive in qualifying specific. Let’s see what we can do in the race. I am looking forward to it whatever the conditions.”

Giorgio Ascanelli, technical director

“Our best qualifying of the year in the dry. Already in Japan we saw that our car has made a step forward and here it was better still. Although I am happy with this performance there is still a very slight feeling of regret, as I think we could have got at least one car into the top ten, but we have to be happy with this and, if we get a wet race, it’s the same for everybody.”