Garage power shutdown hampers Ferrari in Bahrain

Sebastian Vettel has revealed his testing time for Ferrari in Bahrain was hampered by a power shutdown in the team's garage on Wednesday.

Having been testing for Pirelli on Tuesday, Vettel was back in the main car on the final day of the in-season test at the Bahrain International Circuit but completed just eight laps in the opening hour before a long delay. Reflecting on the day's running, Vettel described it as: "A bit mixed, not ideal.

"We lost a lot of time. One, we had an issue with the car which we could fix but then also we had a power supply issue when the whole garage shut down and I think we lost another two hours trying to fix it became it came back.

"When we got on track we were able to at least try a couple of things. I think yesterday was good for Antonio [Giovinazzi], he got most of the program done. I think we could reconfirm a couple of things. Ideally would have liked to run more today, but as I said, it was still good to get some laps."

Vettel was the only driver to complete two days of running in Bahrain as a result of the Pirelli test, which came off the back of his second victory of the season on Sunday. Facing such a tight championship battle against Mercedes this year, Vettel played down the importance of losing out on track time even on a day when Valtteri Bottas completed 143 laps.

"I don't think the championship positioning changes anything, but first of all it is always nice to drive the car. Second, I think it's always useful to learn something. The conditions were fairly stable – the wind sometimes was quite strong and made it more difficult but I think we had similar conditions to the race weekend which was very good.

"I think in that regard [tire knowledge] every lap that you do helps. Obviously the cars are still quite new to everyone; so are the tires, so every lap that you do will help you."

Having been on a harder compound than Mercedes for his quickest lap – with Bottas using the supersoft compared to the Ferrari's soft – Vettel played down the lap time difference between the two cars having been within 0.3s.

"I don't know what they did. They obviously ran the whole day – I didn't get to follow much in the afternoon when we started running. Before that I followed a bit, but you don't know what people are doing so it doesn't really matter where you are on the time sheets. But I was reasonably happy with the car. We had a good balance at the weekend so obviously we were able to carry that over for the test."