Ferrari yet to find to find ‘silver bullet’ fix - Vettel

Sebastian Vettel admits Ferrari still does not “know entirely” what has caused its performance fluctuations during the early rounds of the 2019 Formula 1 season.

After a strong pre-season showing Ferrari was billed as early favourites by its chief rivals Mercedes and Red Bull, but the Scuderia is yet to claim a race win in the opening four races, while Mercedes has recorded four consecutive one-twos.

Ferrari conceded it was struggling to get Pirelli’s 2019 tyres into the optimum working window in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, with Vettel likening extracting pace from its SF90 to trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube.

“The honest answer is that we don’t know entirely,” Vettel replied when asked what had changed between testing and the Melbourne season-opener.

“The car was really good at testing, we arrived in Australia and we struggled a little bit to feel the same. I think the first four races for us have been a little bit up and down, there were stretches where the car was really good and other parts where the car really hasn’t.

“Deep down I think we know that the car is strong so I think we are trying to put the bits down and understand, but we haven’t found a silver bullet. In the last 10 years I haven’t found a silver bullet so I don’t think it exists.

“So it’s really getting down to the detail and trying to understand more, trying to understand the conditions that we faced and try to improve and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

Ferrari has brought forward its first engine upgrade of the season and Vettel hopes the team can recapture some of its promising performance at this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona - the venue which hosted winter testing.

“This weekend will be interesting for us because we had such a good feeling [here] not so long ago,” he explained.

“I’m pretty sure I’m aware of what I remember of how the car felt and it will be interesting to see how the car behaves over the next few days but I am quite confident if we can get to that level we will be competitive.

“We hope to improve the car. We have brought and introduced some bits in Baku already in the last race and another set of new parts here, so we want to make the car faster.

“Here and there we were reasonably quick but not quick enough overall to put the cars on the front row at every event. We are lacking a little bit but I think overall the package is promising. We know that we have a strong car, we have just struggled a bit to put it together.

“We are working flat-out to make sure we have the fastest car on the grid and make sure we win all the races that are left.”