Adrian Newey admits one-stop strategy with Sebastian Vettel was "tantalisingly" in reach

Red Bull technical chief Adrian Newey has revealed the team were "tantalisingly close" to not pitting Sebastian Vettel for tyres for a second time in the Abu Dhabi GP.

Although a second safety car was deployed almost immediately after Vettel rejoined the circuit, Newey confirmed that, given the caution period ultimately proved relatively short, they would have needed "another one beyond that one" to have made any one-stop plan work. Nonetheless, the Englishman admitted to Ted that he had never expected to be salvage such a strong result in the first place having started from the pitlane. Asked if he had shared Vettel's expectation of a podium finish, Newey replied: "Crikey, no, not really. We'd done our simulations and were hoping for minor placings, so somewhere between eighth and maybe fifth was the expectation - certainly not a podium." The decision late on Saturday night to thrown Vettel out of qualifying for fuel irregularties had appeared to deal a hammer blow to the German's hopes of a third successive world title heading into the season's final two races. But in wake of an ultimately successful recovery job, Newey paid fullsome tribute to the Red Bull team as a whole. "I often say I feel as if my character's been fully formed and that was another example of it!" he added. "It was a very stressful weekend. I think the Red Bull team handled the problem we had in qualifying very well. Sebastian did a brilliant job of not being down in the mouth. Everybody knuckled down and did their best to rescue as much as we could out of it. "We were all here late last night deciding what we could do having elected to pull the car out of parc ferme, that left us free on set-up, gear choice, wing level and so forth so we re-optimised the car for overtaking even though we felt we were giving away a little bit of ultimate race pace. Where we were going to lose track time was getting past people rather than the last tenth of race pace, or lap time, [so that] was the trade we made."