Ferrari, Vettel: "Now we will hear from the experts..."

"I started well and in the first two laps we gained positions, overtaking Ricciardo and Perez: we were also faster than Verstappen, I think we were the second force on the track today – the comment of Sebastian Vettel who concluded the Japanese GP close to the podium – It was only a matter of time, but of course Max also tried to advance his pit stops to maintain track position and this tactic worked for him. We tried to fit the softer tires in the final stages, and initially we thought it would work, but the degradation was too high and took us away from the leading group. In hindsight it is easy to criticize and I am sure that many 'experts' had already understood everything; but both at the wall and in the car we agreed and I wanted to try this strategy, delaying the last pit stop. In fact, I lost a lot of time with the blue flags: I always found lapped people in the first sector, where they couldn't give me a path, and I lost a lot of time in addition to probably my position on Lewis, who instead got rid of lapped people on the straight. But I don't know if the pace would have been enough to get on the podium anyway".