As the first official day of the Mexican Grand Prix weekend gets underway Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel is gearing himself up to give all he possibly can so as to keep the title championship alive for a little bit longer.
As it stands, if Lewis Hamilton comes fifth or above on Sunday afternoon, even if Seb wins the race, the crown is his, so it is going to be an uphill battle for the Ferrari driver, but a battle he is not afraid to take onโฆ
โWe are still here to fight and we want to do it till the end,โ he said. โWe are trying to do our best and win and then we'll go from there. Everything that we can learn today will help us for the future, this is the thinking inside the whole team. We need to keep going and push on our development.โ
โLast year, the start for us was important as it gave us the best opportunity to attack, but this year, we should have better chances during the race. We have had a mixed year with ups and downs, which I think is normal for a team. There were races we couldn't finish and that hurts. But we have a good car and on paper we should be more competitive here, so let's see what happensโ.
The Mexican track first staged an F1 race in '63 and was back on the calendar from 1986 to '92 and then again from 2015, each time getting shorter in length, from the original 5 kilometres to the current 4.304 kms. Its most striking feature is what happens to the air here, because the Mexican metropolis sits at 2300 metres above sea level, so that air density is around a quarter less (leaving aside the matter of pollution) than at sea level.
Today's turbocharged engines deal with this deficiency thanks to the compressor, but the level of aerodynamic downforce required is very high, precisely because the air doesn't โpush downโ on the cars as it would do at a lesser altitude.
Here again, and even more so than at most tracks, the setting for the fans is spectacular and support for Ferrari is not restricted to the circuit itself, as the minibuses used to transport the Scuderia team members to the track are soon spotted and mobbed with affection.
