Vettel: I am not giving up, definitely not

Sebastian Vettel has vowed to fight down to the wire until the end of the season despite his title chances taking a knock in Valencia courtesy of two engine failures. Currently twenty-five points behind championship leader Button, the German has six races remaining to close the gap.

Having been Button's closest challenger after the German Grand Prix, Vettel is now the fourth of the top four men in the Drivers' Championship. With 2009 rules placing eight engines on offer to each driver for the season, the 22-year-old has been the unfortunate victim of four Renault powerplant failures in 2009 and has only two remaining before 10-place grid penalties begin to kick in.

"Obviously it is not a good thing," Vettel said at Spa on Thursday. "Last weekend, having two failures within two days was not a good thing - surely it affects the programme for the rest of the season. The last thing we want is to take a penalty, so the question now is what can we do; we are now considering all of our options and possibly this means less running for myself on a Friday, so less practice which, for sure, is not an advantage."

With Red Bull Racing believing that less fine-tuning of setup work is a better solution that grid penalties (and therefore a higher risk of accidents at the start of races), the move may force the Milton Keynes squad to concentrate this year's efforts on Mark Webber, although Sebastian will up the ghost easily.

"I think it is still possible," he continued. "I am not giving up, definitely not. For sure, 25 points is not easy but we have seen how quickly things can change. Also I think one thing that extremely helps is that Jenson has not been very consistent the last races, he hasn't scored a lot of points - I don't know what was wrong but, in the end, it helps us.

"We should have been scoring some points over the last few races but we didn't so that doesn't help but for the future it remains open. We will push and we will fight. We are in the hunting position, so we will have to score big points."

Source: GP Update