With an all Red Bull in front of Sebastian Vettel for the start of the Mexican Grand Prix, the Ferrari driver believes that the blue cars may be their own worst enemies when the lights go out for the start of the race on Sunday.
With Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen annexing the front row for the race and fellow title contender, Lewis Hamilton, starting from third Vettel needs a huge dollop of luck to win the race and not have the Mercedes driver in the top seven.
His first hurdle though will be the Red Bulls ahead of him on the grid.
After qualifying the German told reporters, “I think we probably have the best reliability so far. The Red Bulls are very fast and hard to beat but maybe they will beat themselves.”
Vettel inadvertently (or not) referring to the collision between Ricciardo and Verstappen which eliminated the pair during their feisty clash at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix
Of his final effort in Q3, which was three tenths better than teammate Kimi Raikkonen, the four-time F1 World Champion said, “It was not a very clean flying lap. I knew I had to find at least two tenths and it didn’t happen. It was very close. It was not a bad lap but it just didn’t come together.”
“I’m quite happy though, I think we got more or less everything out of the car. Obviously dropping back to fourth from second is not satisfying but we’ll see what we can do tomorrow.”
“It’s a long race, I think it will be decided over strategy and tyres. We have good straight-line speed so we’ll see what we can do into Turn 1 and then go from there,” added Vettel who has never won in Mexico and needs to do so on Sunday to keep his very slim title hopes alive.