Vettel hails ‘better’ day

Putting in more laps on Thursday than Red Bull had covered over the previous five days of testing, Sebastian Vettel says he is encouraged.

The four-time World Champion was in action at the Sakhir circuit for the second day running and managed 59 laps.

That was a marked improvement on the RB10's previous running as in Jerez Red Bull managed just 21 laps over four days before Vettel added another 14 laps on Day One at Bahrain.

"Definitely a better day today," he said. "We did more laps, so that's encouraging.

"It's good to check the car, check the reliability, but obviously there is a lot still to do.

"It was good to get a proper first feel for the car and it feels OK but there's a lot more to come."

Vettel, though, was sorely lagging behind his rivals when it came to pace.

While Kevin Magnussen topped the timesheets with a 1:34.910, Vettel finished in seventh place, 5.430s down and even behind the Caterham of Kamui Kobayashi.

"It's difficult to talk about catching up [to rivals] because I don't know what other people are doing, but we did more laps than we have done so far and that's the big thing.

"We're learning every single lap, even if the quality of the lap is sometimes not the best. However, the most important thing is to run and we did that.

"The last two days have been very useful. I hope Daniel can get some more good laps in tomorrow."