Sebastian Vettel remains “hungry to perform” and is far from “over the hill”, Aston Martin boss Otmar Szafnauer insists.
Last month, the four-time world champion began his new chapter post-Ferrari by visiting Aston’s Silverstone factory to begin the process of settling in and preparing for the 2021 Formula 1 season.
And commenting on what he’s seen and heard about Vettel so far, Szafnauer notes Vettel remains as meticulous as ever with his approach.
“He’s really hungry to perform,” he told Sky Sports.
“We’ve started working with him this year already and you can see it. He asks all the right questions – and a lot of them, he’s really hungry for knowledge.
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“An engineer described Sebastian to me as having a performance engineer behind the wheel. He wants to know as much, if not more than the performance engineer you have working on the car, whose job it is to understand every little aspect of the car’s performance.
“That’s a good trait to have and he has carried that with him to our team, we see it and he’s really hungry, as he said, to have fun again in Formula 1.
“But fun to him means being competitive. Fun for him means working really hard and extracting every bit of performance out of the car and achieving what the team can achieve and being a big part of that.”
Still, there are those who continue to question whether Vettel, after his worst full season ever in F1 in 2020, still has it.
“Those questions are all valid questions coming off the season he had last year, but the way I look at it is at 33 years old you don’t forget how to drive a Formula 1 racing car fast,” Szafnauer maintained.
“He definitely hasn’t forgotten how to do that, and the work ethic is still there. He’s really, really hungry to perform. I think his attitude coming into here, he wants to continue racing if it can be fun.
“He’s highly motivated, he and Lance [Stroll] will be a great partnership. Seb is very experienced but not over the hill by any means at the age of 33.”
And picking up on the relationship with his new teammate, the Aston Martin chief is confident the mix of youth and experience will work just as well as in recent years.
“Lance is much younger and on the learning curve but naturally very fast,” he said. “So, I think that combination will suit us very well.
“The other thing is we’ve had a history of drivers working very closely together to extract the most we can out of the team and the car.
“Even in the days when Esteban [Ocon] and Sergio [Perez] would occasionally come together on track, behind the scenes they shared all their data, they worked together and they worked tirelessly to make sure that we got the best out of the car over a weekend.
“I can see that will continue with Sebastian and Lance. I look forward to that. Lance can learn from Seb. Seb can learn from Lance as well because Lance is now the veteran here.
“He’s the one who has driven last year’s car, he knows the characteristics of it more so than Seb does. So I look forward to that pairing.”
