Scuderia Ferrari's complicated afternoon in Austria

All was not well at the Scuderia Ferrari camp with an early retirement and a botched pitstop on their menus.

Sebastian Vettel had started the day with high hopes of chasing down, or at least keeping up, the Silver Arrows up front, but the same couldn’t be said about team mate Kimi Raikkonen. Raikkonen finds himself in a less than satisfactory position down at the tail end of the grid missing out on Q2 entirely the previous day.

But both Ferraris started extremely well, Sebastian Vettel had managed to maintain third place from closest rival Felipe Massa in the Williams while Kimi Raikkonen had made it up the grid the moment the five red lights went out.

Unfortunately for Raikkonen, when racing on the long straight after turn two, the Flying Finn lost the rear end of his car skidding to the left and collecting Fernando Alonso in the McLaren-Honda. Both drivers crashed into the barriers and skidded the rest of the straight before coming to stop with the McLaren atop the Ferrari. The Medical car was immediately on hand to check on the drivers but both drivers climbed out of their cars unharmed.

Vettel on the other hand found himself under pressure at the restart after the safety car. Felipe Massa’s Williams gave the sole running Ferrari a scare before Vettel managed to pull a comfortable gap between them. But Vettel’s uneventful race came to an end when he entered the pit lane for his sole pitstop.

A problem with the wheel gun had seen Vettel stationary longer than expected allowing both Mercedes drivers to pull a huge gap and Felipe Massa to get ahead when he rejoined the race in P4. From then on Vettel started his chase to hunt down Massa’s Williams.

The crowd watched in awe as Vettel set fastest lap after fastest lap to close the gap, the scarlet Ferrari caught up with the Williams car with just five laps left. Unfortunately for Vettel, Massa’s Mercedes powered Williams was too fast at the straights for a DRS overtake. Before anybody know it, Vettel had ran out of laps to pull a spectacular overtaking move on the Martini car, bringing his sole surviving Ferrari home in fourth place, missing out on the podium again.

Jerrica Leong