FORMULA ONE ITALIAN GP:RED BULL Racing's Sebastian Vettel set the pace in practice ahead of this afternoon's qualifying session and insisted his team can be competitive on a track where most had handed victory to McLaren before a wheel turned in anger.

Monza’s combination of sweeping corners and super fast straights, broken only by heavy-braking chicanes, naturally favours the more powerful McLarens of series leader Lewis Hamilton and defending champion Jenson Button and with Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner admitting his team’s Renault engine is as much as 30bhp down compared with McLaren’s Mercedes powerplant, Vettel and series-contesting team-mate Mark Webber would have been forgiven for looking ahead to the upcoming race in Singapore rather than this weekend in Milan.

Vettel though ran second quickest in yesterday’s morning session, finishing just one tenth behind Button, with Hamilton third. In the afternoon, though, the Red Bull Racing driver topped the time sheet, this time eclipsing the Ferraris of Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa as the McLaren pair dropped to fourth and fifth.

“It was quite good today – obviously it’s a Friday so lap times may vary and you don’t know the fuel loads – but I’m pretty confident today probably looks much better than here one year ago,” said Vettel, who sits third in the championship table, 31 points behind Hamilton.

Last year Vettel and Webber were soundly beaten at high-speed track, the KERS-assisted Ferraris and McLarens accelerating away from the pack as Vettel limped to eighth and Webber crashed out. This time, though, Vettel insisted his team had prepared hard and were unsurprised by their competitiveness yesterday.

“No KERS this year, this helps us, and it’s looking quite good,” he said. “We learned our lesson last year after we got hammered quite badly here. I think we did a step forward, but we need to be patient. In qualifying, we will see the true pace – McLaren is extremely quick, also their cars went off a couple of times so I don’t know if they had a clean afternoon, Ferrari was quick too.

“It will be tight, it’s a short lap here with a lot of straights and not so many corners, so the gap between cars will be very small.”

Webber finished sixth in both sessions, his work being cut short when his car lost power and crawled to a halt due to a loss of water pressure. “That compromised our running a bit, but we still got some good information today,” said the title races’ second-placed driver. “I’ve got to find a little bit of lap time myself, but the car’s performing well so I’m pretty happy today.”

The problem for the Red Bull Racing drivers is that here, all their major rivals are also in the ballpark, with Ferrari’s Alonso confident victory is there for the taking at his team’s home race. “I think we are confident, we are happy with the progress, we are happy with the job,” he said. “We know how strong McLaren will be here, probably favourites for tomorrow’s pole. It will be difficult but we are there, we will fight.”

The potential good news for the Red Bull pair is McLaren’s F-Duct, the device which boosts straightline speed, is adding little to the team’s performance, Hamilton confirming yesterday that because drag levels are so reduced at low-downforce Monza, the benefit of the system is hardly felt.

“It felt fairly similar for us,” he said. “We basically have two levels – one is of course slower on the straights but quicker through the corners, and the other is slower in the corners but quicker on the straights. They pretty much balance themselves out. (Today) it was really trying to decide which was better on higher fuel (for the race) and if there’s more potential in one than the other.”

In whichever configuration the McLaren drivers choose to run their race, the pre-race conviction that both Hamilton and Button will dominate here remains hard to shake and victory for Hamilton and a bad weekend for Webber and Vettel could leave the Red Bull pairing chasing a forlorn cause over the remaining five races.

“This weekend will be very important,” Webber admitted. “We saw a few big people didn’t get points (in Belgium) and while every weekend hands out the same amount of points, the closer you get to the end, you run out of opportunities to get those points.

“In terms of damage limitation, I don’t think we would pick this track as our favourite, but we showed at Spa we could be competitive.”