Sebastian Vettel has admitted that he was not operating at the height of his potential through 2018, having been beaten to the Formula 1 title by Lewis Hamilton.
Vettel led the standings following his victory at the British Grand Prix, his fourth of the campaign, having recovered from earlier setbacks in China, Azerbaijan and France.
Vettel infamously crashed out of the lead on home soil in Germany and won only once more – at August’s Belgian Grand Prix – as a sequence of mistakes and issues hampered his and Ferrari’s prospects.
Those problems coincided with Hamilton and Mercedes hitting form, winning four successive Grands Prix, and the Briton ultimately wrapped up his fifth world title in Mexico.
Hamilton went on to triumph at the final two events of 2018, putting him on 11 wins for the campaign, six clear of Vettel, having been level post-Belgium.
“I think, naturally, the year I’ve had, I don’t think I ever any problems raising my hand if I made a mistake,” said Vettel.
“I think, knowing as well, as a racing driver, how quickly things can go wrong, how quickly things could have gone differently this year, I think, yeah, I have to review a couple of things.
“But there’s other things that I think went wrong and don’t need a lot of reviewing and not over-complicating things too much. I think I know what I need to do.
“Certainly, here and there, looking back I haven’t been at the top of my game so…
“I look at myself first, I think I can be better than I was at times this year.”
Vettel nonetheless feels that he and Ferrari still had performances where it extracted the maximum – but remains wary that improvements are still necessary.
“I think we also had a lot of races where we got everything out of the car and the package and I felt that I did everything I could,” he said. “I was happy with that.
“But yeah, that’s how it goes, that’s sometimes why you love racing and sometimes why you hate racing.
“Obviously we [as a team] lost our path a little bit halfway through the year.
“Things didn’t come together so obviously we did a step back towards the end of the year which enabled us to be more competitive again but I think we’ve understood what went wrong, we obviously tried to do a better job in the future, that was one key thing.
“On the other hand I think we had a lot of lessons, it was a tough year in general.
“I think the team is strong and the team has potential but surely it was a lot of things that happened inside the team.
“The passing of our chairman, Mr [Sergio] Marchionne obviously had an impact and was tough so I think it’s up to us to look into every single detail and make sure we come out as a stronger group, enabling us to build a stronger package for next year and for the future.”
