Sebastian Vettel says he has yet to feel fully comfortable with Ferrari’s 2019 Formula 1 challenger, as his title hopes took another blow in Monaco.
Vettel has not taken a win since last August’s Belgian Grand Prix – a run of 14 grands prix – and has already slipped 55 points behind Lewis Hamilton in this year’s title battle.
No driver has ever recovered from such a deficit to become World Champion in the same season.
“I’ve had some difficult moments this year where I’m fighting the car,” said Vettel, who finished second in Monaco on a weekend in which he crashed in FP3 and hit the wall twice in qualifying.
“I’m not really entering yet to the level where I feel a lot more comfortable and I feel comfortable to squeeze out more performance from the car but I think it’s linked to the fact that we struggle to put our car in the right window.
“Once it is there, it is feeling better and you’re able to build up on that but it doesn’t happen very often but it’s a combination of things.
“I think first we are lacking overall performance and that overall performance would help us probably to put the tyres more often in the window they would like to be in.”
Vettel added that Ferrari needs to get itself into a position to at least be able to put Mercedes under pressure during races.
“I think it’s not been the easiest and straightforward ride so far but I feel that there’s more potential in this car, there’s more potential in the team,” he asserted.
“We need to stick together, we need to work hard and even if it would be nice to flip a coin and turn things around, probably for everybody’s sake except those two guys [Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas], it’s not going to happen overnight.
“We need to work hard and pay a lot of attention to small things, to details, in order to get closer and once we are matched I think we can put a lot more pressure on them.
“I will have a lot closer races but currently we are sitting too far away, behind Mercedes and probably a match on average with Red Bull is not where we want to be.”
