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Vettel thought 'Who's next?' after Verstappen tyre failure

Aston Martin's Sebastian Vettel said he wondered who might be next, after tyre failures took out his teammate and the race leader in Baku

Sebastian Vettel said he wondered who might be next, after a tyre failure took race leader Max Verstappen out of the race, shortly after Vettel's Aston Martin teammate Lance Stroll crashed out with an identical problem. Vettelwas asked for his opinion on the tyre failures, and whether there had been any concerns on his side of the Aston Martin garage given that Stroll's failure initially appeared a one-off incident. "I didn’t know what happened," Vettel told select members of the media, including RacingNews365.com. "Obviously I saw that he lost the car very late in the straight so I thought maybe first he clipped the wall outside of [Turn] 19, but then I looked the next lap and there was not a scratch, so that would have been very unusual but I couldn’t explain why he would crash so late in the straight. "And then the team told me he’s fine. It was strange. Obviously I was on the safer side because my tyres were fresher than everyone else’s but when Max had the same issue, it was quite clear that… who’s next? That sort of thing. I don’t know why but this is not supposed to happen so I think there needs to be a bit of an investigate because it’s probably the worst place of the year you want to have this. "It could go massively wrong if you get it wrong so close to also to pit entry, to the wall there. We are doing well over 300kph. Yeah, I was a bit concerned but then with the red flag then I knew we’re all fitting different tyres and it should be fine." Vettel explained that he wasn't particularly worried about the issue happening to him, given his strategy had him running a much longer first stint than the rest, meaning his hard tyre stint was shorter than most. "I knew it happened around after 30-odd laps because Lance started on the hard tyres and it happened around then and then when Max pitted, it was the same sort of amount of laps," he said. "Strange one – but I wasn't overly concerned because I knew also I would probably be last on the list."

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