• Korean Grand Prix

Vettel felt tyres were under control

Sebastian Vettel was warned over the radio to look after his front right tyre © Press Association

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• Report:
• Vettel wins to take lead in the championship
  

• Race:
• Korean Grand Prix

• Drivers:
• Sebastian Vettel

• Teams:
• Red Bull

Sebastian Vettel felt that he was in control of his tyre wear on his way to winning the Korean Grand Prix.

Although clearly in the lead, Vettel struggled at the end of his second stint and locked up his front right in to turn three as he lost a lot of time with a wearing front right. That lap cost him five seconds of his lead, and having recovered it immediately after the pit stop with a series of fast laps, his race engineer was soon on the radio warning him to look after his tyres.

Vettel said the situation was under control despite a number of worried radio messages, and was just wary that there would have been no recovering from any tyre problems at the end of the race.

"It was a perfect start for myself and after that quite a tight first stint," Vettel said. "Towards the end then I was able to pull away a little bit and open a gap to Mark [Webber], which helped obviously to stay out a little bit longer. After that we had a very good stop, a very strong second stint opening up the gap again only at the end of the second stint I had a mistake braking for turn three locking up the right front.

"I think a lot of people suffered issues with the front today so in the last stint I tried to control it a little bit more and have more juice in the tyre until the end. Obviously we had the gaps and we were controlling that towards the end, but once you reach the point when the front tyres are gone it's sudden death so there's no point of return. We were obviously talking a lot over the radio trying to stay on top of the problem and manage the front tyres quite well - which I think we did until the end - so I'm very happy with the result."

Despite having taken the championship lead from Fernando Alonso, Vettel said it is important Red Bull maintains its good form after saying it has had a smooth time of late.

"I think nothing has changed. Obviously we had a good last couple of races but if you look at the season so far it's been up and down for all of us. Up and down for ourselves as well so we had races we enjoyed, we had races we didn't enjoy, we had successful races, we had not successful races. In the last couple of races it was key to do our thing and nothing got in our way so we need to try and keep our momentum and try to do exactly the same in the next couple of races."

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