Ferrari played down rising speculation its 2016 Formula 1 world championship campaign could be derailed by a fundamental reliability flaw in the power unit of the SF16-H.
Amid rumours of a fault with the turbo design, Kimi Raikkonen - who retired with a flaming airbox in Australia - said before the Bahrain grand prix when asked if Ferrari has a problem: "Well, at the last race we did."
That was before Sebastian Vettel could not even make it to the grid after the warm-up lap on Sunday, as he pulled over his Ferrari car with billowing smoke.
"I think I might have an engine failure," the German declared by radio.
But once back to the paddock, Vettel said in his post race media release, "We had a failure, I saw a lot of smoke from behind and I lost power so we decided to stop the car. For sure it is frustrating, because in the end I am here to race."
"The problem came as a surprise, both for me and the whole team, as I was approaching Turn Eleven. Now we need to understand exactly the problem and learn from it. It is not ideal and we can’t be proud of it," admitted the quadruple world champion.
Maurizio Arrivabene, the Ferrari team boss, told Bild that the failure may simply have been with a valve or injector.
"That's never happened to us before," he added, telling Auto Motor und Sport that it is "90 per cent" sure that Vettel has lost the power unit altogether.
And added, "I am not happy at all, because I think with this strategy and looking at the performance of Kimi, maybe because in the race things are not always certain, but I think we were able to do a very, very good with Sebastian."
But both Vettel and Raikkonen insisted their respective failures in Bahrain and Australia are not a sign that Ferrari's title campaign is off track.
"I had an issue in the last race, Seb had something here," said Kimi, who finished second in Bahrain. "It's not ideal and it's an unfortunate part of the game but, like I said, we have some work to do."
Vettel agreed: "It's not ideal and we can't be proud of it. But we had a good preparation over the winter, we are pushing very hard and we know that we can still improve."
Boss Arrivabene said Sunday in Bahrain was painful for Ferrari, but the bright side is that if Raikkonen's fingers had not slipped on the clutch lever at the start, the Finn might have challenged Nico Rosberg for the win.
"Perhaps, and I stress this, perhaps this has compromised his chance to win," said the Italian team chief.
Raikkonen agreed: "I got surprisingly close to Nico at the end. Considering what happened in the first lap it’s a pretty ok result, it’s not what we want but we keep working and improving things."
Latest News
Loading
