• Chinese Grand Prix - FP2

Gap 'bigger than I'd like' - Vettel

Sebastian Vettel: "I seemed to struggle a little bit more this afternoon" © Getty Images

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• Report:
• Massa heads Raikkonen in FP2
  

• Race:
• Chinese Grand Prix

• Drivers:
• Sebastian Vettel

• Teams:
• Red Bull

Sebastian Vettel admits the gap to the quickest cars was "a little bit bigger than I'd like" after practice for the Chinese Grand Prix.

Nico Rosberg led a Mercedes one-two in FP1 while Felipe Massa was quickest in FP2 as Vettel languished over a second slower than the fastest time in both sessions. Although times can be misleading during Friday practice, Vettel said he felt too far off the ultimate pace but would hope to make steps to close the gap overnight.

"I think it was a tricky day for us," Vettel said. "I seemed to struggle a little bit more this afternoon; the gap to the guys at the top is a little bit bigger than I'd like but we have two or three things that we need to work on and then we should be in better shape tomorrow.

"It's not a disaster; it's not as if we're not in the dark. I think we know a little bit what we need to do but surely I don't have the answer right now. We'll look in to the stuff that we actually did because once you run you just do what you were supposed to do, follow your programme and just get as many laps and as many results as you can. So there's not much time to really analyse in-session, that's what we do after the session."

With the soft tyre life looking very limited, Vettel said he didn't expect it to affect the approaches of the leading teams during qualifying.

"It looks like it's a qualifying tyre more or less. So I don't think it changes the strategy through qualifying but in the race surely we won't see that many stints on the softs. The soft tyres didn't last very well today, in fact not very long at all so we'll see what we can do but for qualifying I think it's still the preferred tyre."

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.