Indian GP 2013: Vettel stays on top in FP3

Sebastian Vettel continued his Indian GP dominance by topping the final practice session by over half a second. Teammate Mark Webber again accompanied him in second. However, it would be interesting to see how they manage the soft tyres in the race tomorrow, which looked very marginal today.

The session earlier was delayed by 20 minutes as the medical helicopter couldn’t operate due to poor visibility. That meant a rather action packed 40 minutes showdown where teams were eager to try out the long runs on the marginal soft tyres. Sebastian Vettel was first one out on the options and while no one could match him on a single lap, his long runs weren’t that encouraging as he dropped to 1:34 by the end of his 10 lap stint.

While Red Bull were dominant as expected, pace of other teams looked a bit different as compared to Friday. Alonso set the third fastest time of the day, only two tenths slower than Webber’s lap time. Hulkenberg meanwhile was fourth fastest, a full one second slower than Vettel’s benchmark. Grosjean was fifth fastest in the leading Lotus.From there lap times were extremely close with Massa, Di Resta and Rosberg separated by nine thousandths of a second. Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton weren’t very far, at least in terms of one lap pace. They completed the top 10.Kimi Raikkonen was initially faster than Grosjean on the medium tyres but lost out to the Frenchmark after the soft tyre run. He ended up eleventh fastest. Maldonado was 12th fastest in the leading Williams while Sergio Perez was 13th.Adrian Sutil couldn’t match his teammate’s storming lap and ended up 14th. His lap time of 1:26.847 was half a second slower than Di Resta’s.