Sebastian Vettel believes that F1 test favourite the Circuit de Catalunya is a good measure of the sport’s pecking order but added there is no reason why any performance order shown in this weekend’s Spanish GP will last for the rest of the season.
“As a rule of thumb this circuit does give you an idea because simply you have all the corners you find somewhere else,” he said. “You have tight chicanes like in the last sector, hard braking for the hairpin, fast corners like in the first sector. You have a bit of everything.” But, while the current Drivers’ Championship leader admitted that the circuit tends to find a team’s true grid position there is no reason why that should not change as the season progresses.
“It’s very familiar but that doesn’t mean if you are competitive here you are competitive everywhere. Equally, if you are not competitive here it doesn’t mean you will never be competitive,” he said. “I think it’s similar to other tracks. Really, if you think which sector you’re talking about, which speed range of the cars. I think you have sectors on every track where you could get an indication [of performance].”
The defending champion admitted, too, that the Barcelona track is one of the season’s most challenging owing to the wealth of set-up knowledge each team possesses. “Yes it is [challenging],” he said. “But as I said as well, you race here in May, it’s quite different if you look at the temperatures compared to February or March, so that does have a big effect on the setup, so whatever you might have found out over the winter in testing, it might not work in the same way or the same style it did during testing.
“Also, you need to consider that the cars you launch are quite different to the cars you race at the first race, and then, you know, you race around May or June later in the season. So, yeah, it’s a bit wishy-washy because of that – but overall it’s a track we know fairly well from a driving point of view as we’ve done a lot of laps here. We should know our way around here.”