Sebastian Vettel, title runner up for season 2019, requires some time for himself to recover after a rough year.
Vettel lost the title to Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton, who won his fifth while joining Juan Manuel Fangio on the all times driver list.
Hamilton closed the season with Abu Dhabi Grand Prix victory with Vettel as runner up and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen as third one on the podium.
Ferrari’s F1 team and their German driver failed to execute in a perfect manner, which cost them the opportunity of naming the title to themselves.
The four-time champion said: “It has been quite an exhausting year for me. I definitely need a bit of a gap.”
But he will be “very, very hungry” for the title next year with more preparation. Because he believed that he could have done much better at times this year, which he will be working on in 2019.
“The year I’ve had, I don’t think I ever have any problems raising my hand if I made a mistake,” he said.
“Knowing as well, as a racing driver, how quickly things can go wrong, how quickly things could have gone differently this year, I think, yeah, I have to review a couple of things.
“But there’s other things that went wrong and don’t need a lot of reviewing and not over-complicating things too much.
“I know what I need to do. Certainly, here and there, looking back I haven’t been at the top of my game so… I look at myself first.”
He was disappointed that the team had “lost our path a little bit halfway through the year”, which cost Ferrari three races. He was referring to the developments introduced at Marina Bay Street Circuit, which didn’t work-out as plan.
“Things didn’t come together so obviously we did a step back towards the end of the year which enabled us to be more competitive again.
“But I think we’ve understood what went wrong. We obviously tried to do a better job in the future. That was one key thing.
“On the other hand I think we had a lot of lessons. It was a tough year in general.
“The team is strong and the team has potential but surely it was a lot of things that happened inside the team.”
