World champion Sebastian Vettel finally managed some laps but at a sluggish pace on Thursday as Red Bull’s pre-season crisis continues.
His tally of 59 laps in the troubled Renault-powered RB10 ended fears Adrian Newey’s latest creation might never run at all, but he was more than five seconds off the pace set by Kevin Magnussen in the McLaren.
“We still have lots of problems – large and small – that we need to fix,” Vettel is quoted by the German newspaper Die Welt.
Red Bull’s Dr Helmut Marko admitted that the task now achieved was simply to get the RB10 to work, and that on Thursday the car “was just rolling around”.
Vettel is quoted by Bild newspaper: “The laptimes are not the best, but the first thing was to get the car running.”