'It's where we are at the moment' concedes Vettel after point-less F1 Spanish GP

Vettel has yet to get off the mark this season as he continued to struggle to adapt to life with his new team at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.

The German’s two-stop strategy ultimately proved to be unsuccessful as he got stuck behind Alfa Romeo’s Kimi Raikkonen.

“In the end I think we finished where the pace is at the moment, so it was a difficult race. You always learn but obviously we would have liked to not just learn, but to score points,” Vettel said.

“It was quite a tricky afternoon, and I was running out of tyre life at the end, even though we went for the two-stop strategy. I made quite an early second stop and came out behind Kimi, which I think hurt my tyres quite a lot.

“That is what made it difficult to fight for points. With hindsight, it is always easy to say what you would do differently, but it was difficult to fight the cars around me in the closing laps when they had a tyre advantage.”

The four-time champion was handed the new aero package for this weekend in Barcelona after running without it in Portimao.

It still wasn’t enough for Vettel to score his first points of the campaign, but he felt the team is making progress.

“But we will keep working hard and we know there is a long season still ahead of us,” Vettel added. The new parts we had here helped, and we need to keep taking steps forward each weekend.”

Aston Martin sits seventh in the constructors' championship, with just five points to its name.