Question: Sebastian, take us through Q3 from your perspective. Mark, for once, had the better of you.
Sebastian Vettel: Yeah, I said straight after the qualifying ‘good job, poker face.’ I think in the end we made the right call. It was very tricky at the start of Q3. There was a lot of water and it was the right thing to get the red flag out as it was just impossible for all of us. There was just too much water. The cars are quite low, so you end up swimming more than driving. But then I think in Q3 we did the right thing. It turned out that the water disappeared quicker than the majority of people thought and Mark was on the better tyre at the end. But, nevertheless, third is a very good position and result for us and the team and everything is possible tomorrow, so as they said already it was a very tricky session and I think it was much more important to get into the next round and qualify as high up as we can, which we did. Shame I had some moment in the fastest lap. I was very close to Nico. I think only about one-tenth, but if you look back there wasn’t that much margin either, so we can be very pleased with third today.
Question: Sebastian, happy to be third on the grid?
Sebastian Vettel: I’m happy.
Question: Two poles so far, happier with the car this morning?
Sebastian Vettel: Yeah, I think we did a step forward overnight and looking… they’ve said it all, really. It was a pretty chaotic qualifying today, up and down. As we saw in Q1 some of the favourites got thrown out going into qualifying. In the end, I think the most important thing was to get into the next round safely which I think we did. Overall, I think we were very consistent. The pace was there. In the end, I think third is a very good result, so I’m happy. There was not much gap missing to the next best car on wets, to Nico, I think about a tenth but also if you look back I think there was plenty of margin, so overall a good day I think. Obviously Mark was the poker face today and made the right decision at the right time. I honestly thought that going into Q3 that that’s (intermediates) a little bit too risky and as we have seen, the majority of people went out on wets. I think that looking back, we did the right thing.
Question: Sebastian, there have been a number of explanations for the problem you had in Melbourne, even to the extent of one of your suppliers issuing a statement to say it wasn’t responsible. Can you tell us what did go wrong and are there any new and/or different parts on your car as a result?
Sebastian Vettel: It’s a difficult one to explain. Initially it felt like a braking failure, so that’s what we said straight after the race but it turned out not to be anywhere linked to the brakes, so the brakes were working fine, so Brembo did a good job. Sorry for the call on Sunday afternoon last week. But it turned out to be a problem with the… basically we lost the ability to transmit power or torque to the wheel. Accelerating is not a big issue because the wheels just get quicker, but as you know, we have brakes everywhere, on every single wheel on the car and to stop the car, you rely on every single brake you have, so on all four wheels, to work and on the left front, as I said, we lost the ability to transmit torque. When I was hitting the brakes, down to turn 13, all the brakes worked but the left front wheel kept on running, so that in the end I was kind of braking on three wheels, which, when you set your reference point, doesn’t really work, so that was the failure. As a consequence, we obviously had to understand why this happened, and I think we did, so we’re confident that we haven’t got any problems with that any more. I think we tidied things up a bit, so I think we know why it happened and we understood the problem, so it shouldn’t happen again, as I said. We haven’t really got new parts but trimmed a bit.
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