VETTEL: FERRARI READY TO PUSH MERCEDES
Ferrari star Sebastian Vettel says the Italian team is only a small step away from toppling the dominance of Mercedes in F1.
Vettel won five times in 2018 on his way to second in the points table behind world champion Lewis Hamilton, and the German says Ferrari is only a few tweaks away from being a constant threat to the Silver Arrows in the 2019 campaign.
Four-time champion Vettel said: “I think the motivation is to win, and to win with Ferrari. That’s my ambition, my target, we’re not quite there yet so we try again.”
Sebastian Vettel says that his Ferrari team only has small steps to make to put it on a par with Mercedes in the battle for the 2019 F1 title.
The four-time world champion was ahead in the standings up until the 10th round of the season at Silverstone but the Italian team failed to capitalise while Mercedes, and Lewis Hamilton in particular, went on a run of six wins from seven races – interrupted only by a Vettel victory at Spa in Belgium in August.
That allowed Mercedes, which has won every championship since the switch to the hybrid turbo formula in 2014, to steal a march and Hamilton wrapped up the crown at the Mexican Grand Prix in late October.
Vettel eventually finished 88 points behind his British rival.
“I think it was a long year, we had our ups and down,” said 31-year-old Vettel. “We were able, as a team, to do another step but still the last step is missing to make sure that we have a word until the end of the championship and fight for it all the way and not just for parts of the season.”
Small gaps
Vettel said that although he was disappointed to have lost out in the final reckoning, he was pleased with the progress made by the Scuderia to be involved in a closer fight with Mercedes over the course of the campaign.
The German driver has been with Ferrari since 2015, and scored more points throughout the 2018 campaign than any previous year, finishing second in the standings for the second successive season.
“First of all it’s a nice position to be in, to be able to fight for the championship. The years after my last championship haven’t been straightforward,” explained Vettel.
“It’s nice to be back fighting for wins and having a word in the championship. If you look at the whole championship we were still too far away. It was looking quite good and close up to halfway through. After that we had quite a significant drop in performance that made it quite difficult for us and equally Lewis together with Mercedes had a very, very strong sequence of races scoring a lot of points. A lot of wins. Then the gap opened up quite quickly.
“You always believe and fight until the end. It was [at] Mexico I realised it would be difficult and then impossible once we crossed the line. Until then I didn’t really follow the points too closely. I knew it wasn’t going in my favour. I think the motivation is to win, and to win with Ferrari. That’s my ambition, my target, we’re not quite there yet so we try again.”
Vettel said that the performance of the SF71H chassis was encouraging at a number of circuits and didn’t have the peaks and troughs of previous machines.
“We had our races that we maybe mentioned where we were very close and very competitive, overall our car this year has been more an all round car which worked on all tracks but we had our highlights,” he said. “But then we had too many races where we were not quite there, sometimes by a tenth
or two but sometimes a bit more, where we were left with not much to do over a weekend and that is something we must fix and try to control better going into next year.”
Remembering Gilles
Vettel took five wins over the course of the 21-race campaign and has singled out two as being particularly special to him.
He took four wins over the opening half of the season, including back-to-back triumphs in the opening two rounds of the year, but then only managed a single victory in the second portion of the series when he claimed the Belgian Grand Prix.
Vettel said: “I would say [the] Bahrain [win was special] because initially I didn’t like it but now I really love it, I loved the trophy after the race, it was a tight battle after the last laps so good to hang onto the lead until the end.
“Then I think the other one is the Canadian Grand Prix, especially 40 years after Gilles [Villeneuve] with Ferrari. It was a very emotional day.”
New partnership
Looking ahead to 2019, Vettel will have a new team-mate at Ferrari for the first time since he joined the Scuderia in 2015.
Vettel has taken 13 wins in that time, while team-mate Kimi Raikkonen only managed to win a single race, the USA GP this year. However, Raikkonen has now left the team and it has signed up-andcoming racer Charles Leclerc to partner the German.
Vettel says the pair will work together to thrust Ferrari back to the summit of the F1 world championship.
“I don’t know Charles so much yet, he doesn’t know me,” says Vettel. “He’s a good kid so I don’t expect that there’s anything wrong on-track. We will be rivals as much as Kimi and myself have been rivals. You will try to get first and if you do that you beat everybody else, also your teammate. We will see, we also know we want to bring Ferrari back to winning ways.
“For him it’s a different point in his career compared to mine. From what I know now and how much I know him now, he seems like a good guy.”