Aston Martin remains sure Sebastian Vettel will “get there” despite a poor first race weekend at the Bahrain Grand Prix.
What was expected to be the start of a new chapter at the Silverstone-based team, instead, carried many hallmarks from the German’s final few years at Ferrari.
The only points Vettel scored were penalty points on his superlicence, with a total of five given to him on Sunday for ignoring yellow flags in qualifying and then colliding with Esteban Ocon during the race.
By the chequered flag, Vettel, who started at the back of the grid, was only 15th, and he admits there is will a long way to go in his settling in process.
“There are a lot of things that we learned in the race that we need to address,” he was quoted by The Race.
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“I’m not at home in the car, there are a lot of things fighting me so that I can’t really focus on driving. We need to address them and try to fix them quickly.
“I obviously need to adapt to how the car wants to be driven, but there are a lot of things that add a certain inconsistency that don’t help so these things we need to get on top of.
“We tried a lot with the car and with the set-up and there are a lot of things that still don’t work the way they should.
“Once we fix them and we get on top of the set-up, we’ll know where the car wants to be to be fast, then it can only get better.”
More broadly, it was a difficult weekend for Aston Martin, who rarely featured in the top 10, and Vettel admits he will have to work to keep morale high.
“Well it’s part of my job, but it’s also part of my job to drive the car and race well, which today I did not,” he conceded.
“It’s probably not the start of the season I wanted but I think the next couple of races will be very good for us to calm things down.”
Vettel’s performance has already raised questions as to whether Aston made the right call in signing the 33-year-old, but team boss Otmar Szafnauer was quick to squash that talk.
“It’s very, very early to say that,” he stated. “It wasn’t the best race but if you look at the positives, he had to start last he was running in the top 10 for a while and felt good in the car.
“Watching it from the pit wall his lap times were not that dissimilar to Lance [Stroll] who’s been driving here for a while and knows the car well and ended up finishing in a relatively decent position.
“The car he is driving now is totally different from what he drove before, from car characteristics, powertrain characteristics, a lot of things,” Szafnauer added.
“It’s really early days, he’s didn’t do a lot of laps in winter testing, we only had three days and he seemed to have all the problems. I’m still confident we’ll get Seb there.”