Ferrari F1 team can't get tyres working in Baku says Kimi Raikkonen

Vettel was the quickest Ferrari, but he was 1.996 seconds off the pace in eighth while Raikkonen was 11th, nearly half a second further back.

"We don't know what the others are doing, but when everything worked the balance was kind of OK," said Raikkonen.

"But it was more about trying to get the tyres to work for one lap and this seems to be a difficulty right now.

"They don't work exactly like we want and the challenge is to switch them on.

"More laps seem to help but over one lap it's clear we need to find something to get the grip out of them."

Both Ferraris had mechanical problems at the end of the afternoon.

Raikkonen locked up on the run to Turn 4 and stopped in the escape road before reporting a problem with the car, believed to be to do with the MGU-K.

"The car just stopped but I don't know the reason," said Raikkonen.

"Something happened, the team will find out once the team have got the car back."

Vettel said he was called back as a precaution, adding: "I didn't have a problem, obviously Kimi had.

"We took precautions as something similar might happen so we took it easy."

Despite Ferrari's apparent lack of pace, Vettel remained upbeat.

"We had a decent day, we did a lot of laps," he said.

"We have the pace., we just struggled to find it.

"I don't think we had a bad day.

"We got to know the track, that was quite interesting and was the main objective for today.

"[The two-second gap to Mercedes] is not nice, it's not good news. but some of it we can explain and other bits we have to wait to see what tomorrow brings.

"It's been a tricky day for us, maybe not entirely clean if you look at raw pace but then again it's Friday so no need to worry."