Sebastian Vettel will receive a new chassis for the Italian Grand Prix as the team believe an issue with his current chassis might be the reason for his “extremely unusual” pace.
The German qualified third for the Belgian Grand Prix last weekend, but during the race he wasn’t on the pace of team-mate and eventual race winner Daniel Ricciardo, instead finishing down in fifth.
The team hope that changing the chassis will help Vettel recover some lost ground – despite this being his third chassis of the season.
“Sebastian has got the best feeling for these tyres as history has shown,” said team principal Christian Horner. “We have to look in to it to understand; there’s obviously something wrong that he wasn’t able to have the same pace as Daniel and be harder on the tyre.
“Obviously we missed out on Friday on any running of any real benefit to Seb, and of course we need to check whether something has actually broken on the car.
“There’s obviously a lot of things that have gone wrong for him. A spark plug failure on Friday robbed him of a lot of time so then he has to take a lot of information from the other car. We know their styles are quite different. So of course we need to check whether something is actually broken on the car because that was extremely unusual what we saw.”
