Vettel: After intense analysis Ferrari can’t make promises

Sebastian Vettel says Ferrari has undergone “very intense” Australian Grand Prix analysis to understand why his team’s perceived pace disappeared but concedes there are no guarantees of fixes arriving at the second round in Bahrain.

Despite being tipped as pre-season favourites, Ferrari failed to deliver throughout the 2019 opener in Australia as the Italian squad struggled to find a setup to give Vettel the same confidence and feeling with the SF90 from winter testing in Spain.

Arriving in Bahrain, Vettel says the past two weeks has seen Ferrari run a thorough post-race analysis into its pace problems, as he had to settle for an underwhelming fourth place at Albert Park with teammate Charles Leclerc holding station in fifth place, but accepts nothing can be guaranteed until it tests out the fixes on track this weekend.

“There were a lot of reports and a big analysis because we wanted to be in a different place. So the last couple of weeks have been very intense,” Vettel said. “I think we have some answers, but as always you never get all the answers because we never get the chance to go back and repeat.

“Things move on, we’re here now in Bahrain on a different track but I think we learned some stuff about the car and ourselves that should help us to be more competitive here.”

But despite his optimism, Vettel accepts Ferrari’s conclusions remain theoretical until it can be demonstrated on track in Bahrain at a race the German driver has won for the past two consecutive years.

“I think we are not in a position to be making promises, the truth is we need to wait and see,” he said. “It’s easy to quantify how slow we were in qualifying and to quantify how much slower we were in the race.

“There are some numbers that we can with confidence say that we should have been better or would have been better if we go back and repeat, but it’s all theory so we need to prove it on track.”