Vettel says new upgrades ‘helped’ but remains frustrated as point-less run continued in Spain

Sebastian Vettel said Aston Martin took a step forward in Spain as he drove the upgraded AMR21 car for the first time, but with a 13th-place finish he was frustrated to once again fail to score his first points for his new team.

It was a difficult, non-scoring race for the four-time champion and Aston Martin as team mate Lance Stroll finished just outside the points in 11th, and Vettel came home behind former Ferrari team mate Kimi Raikkonen in 13th.

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Cutting an exasperated figure after the race, Vettel said: “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 that, after making an early stop on Lap 21 and emerging behind Raikkonen, his race was jeopardised.

“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,” he said. “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.

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

Having received aero upgrades in Spain that were fitted to Stroll’s car in Portugal, Vettel will look to take his first points of the season at the next race in Monaco.