Vettel: Ferrari had a better package than Red Bull

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Sebastian Vettel believes mistakes made at the start of 2016 cost Ferrari in its fight with Red Bull for second in the constructors' championship.

Ferrari started this season with the target of fighting Mercedes for the championship until the final race of the season having taken three wins last year. The early signs were promising, with Vettel losing out on victory in Melbourne due to a strategic error, but he then failed to start the Bahrain Grand Prix after a power unit failure on the formation lap.

Having also failed to finish in Russia due to a collision with Daniil Kvyat, Vettel sees the start to the season as costly as he feels Ferrari had the better all-round car than Red Bull.

"Up and down not as good as expected," Vettel said. "Overall it has been a bit up and down season I think it could have been a lot better points-wise I think we didn’t manage to score enough points at the beginning of the year.

"Towards the end we have found ourselves in a very tight battle with Red Bull but I think overall we have had the stronger package and should have finished second in the constructors’ championship. Especially at the beginning we dropped too many points.

"The big disappointment is that we didn’t manage to fight with Mercedes but nevertheless there have been a lot of things happen in the background which should make the team stronger for the next years."

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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.