- Red Bull
Winless 2014 does not bother Vettel
Sebastian Vettel says he does not care about other people's perceptions of his 2014 season as he knows the issues which have prevented him from winning a race.
Vettel's defence of his four successive titles has seen him be overshadowed by Red Bull team-mate Daniel Ricciardo, who has won three times in his debut year at the team. Vettel, who is leaving Red Bull at the end of the year and looks set to join Ferrari, thinks his final year at the team would have been a different story had he been luckier.
"Some are clear and easy to explain," Vettel said about his failure to win a race this year. "The most thing important is that I know what was going on behind the scenes, the problems we had to deal with. Performance-wise I think we got very close to winning in Canada; if I pitted a lap later I think it's a different story. If you just look at the raw result, in terms of raw pace we looked very strong in Singapore as well. Hungary as well, but if you look at where the safety car came out there, it didn't really favour me.
"We had some races where we were closer. The majority of races it's not a secret that the win was out of reach simply because the Mercedes was so far away. There were other races where I struggled more than Daniel - if you take Belgium, for instance. It's pretty much up and down but it's been like that for the whole season."
Despite his run of dominance in F1 - which saw him accumulate 39 victories and four championships in six seasons - coming to an end this year Vettel is not counting down the days until 2014 comes to an end.
"Not really, I don't see it that way," when asked if he was relieved the season is coming to an end. "I think we had lots of things to fight with, a difficult winter to start and recover from. I think this part of Formula One as well. Obviously I've been very fortunate to be in the position I was for the last couple of years. I had technical issues and so on like everyone else but sometimes things are coming together, sometimes they are not. It seems like this year it seems all the things are not really coming together. But that's how it is sometimes."
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