Vettel doesn't feel pressure from Marchionne

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Sebastian Vettel says comments from Sergio Marchionne about Ferrari are a positive rather than increasing pressure on the team.

Marchionne challenged Ferrari to be the team to beat from the opening race of 2016, and told Italian media after the Russian Grand Prix that he is hurt by the gap to Mercedes. While Vettel would not be drawn on specific comments from the Ferrari president, he says the focus on the team's performance is a positive sign.

"I think it is great that our president cares," Vettel said. "He is really in tune with the team, he wants to help us where he can and of course he is upset and disappointed when things happen that are out of your hands, you are not finishing the race or you are not finishing where we could have finished. So I see more the positives rather than the pressure.

"I think it is good to have him behind us. I speak to him and the team speaks to him, so this makes me quite confident. Bit by bit things are going the right way. We set the target to win this year, we haven’t achieved that yet so you have a fair point if you want to criticise us but the guys are behind us."

Asked what Marchionne has told him, Vettel said it is simply a case of both expressing their desire to return to winning ways as quickly as possible,

"It is not secret, we want to bring Ferrari back to the top sooner rather than later. As I said before, the races we have had could have been better but they were not. We can keep talking about the races we have had, it doesn’t change anything but it is smarter investing our time in the races we have ahead of us.

"There are no big secrets, everyone in the team, including him is wanting to make progress. I think we are working dissimilarly to other teams, we are pushing hard and he is a big part of the team. Sure, he lets us know where he wants the team to be, but equally we have the same motivation here."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.