Aston Martin’s Formula 1 team boss, Otmar Szafnauer, says that newcomer Sebastian Vettel is like “having a performance engineer behind the wheel”.
Vettel made his first appearance at Aston Martin last week after leaving Ferrari, and the four-time world champion seems to have made an immediate impression on his new team.
The German wants to banish memories of the difficult past few years at Ferrari by helping to lead the former Racing Point squad into their new era as the Aston Martin works team.
And team boss Szafnauer gave a brilliant judgment on Vettel after his first day at the Silverstone-based team.
“At 33 you don’t forget how to drive a Formula 1 racing car fast, so he definitely hasn’t forgotten how to do it,” Szafnauer told Sky Sports.
“And for sure the work ethic is still there, he’s really, really hungry for performance.
“We started working with him this year and you can see it. He asked the right questions and lots of questions. He’s really hungry for knowledge.
On the subject of matching items
“An engineer described Sebastian to me as [like] have a performance engineer behind the wheel.
“He wants to know as much, if not more, than the performance engineer you work on the car, whose job it is to understand every little aspect of car performance. Seb wants to know so much – and more.
“That’s a good quality, he has it, he has taken it into our team. We see it and he is really, really hungry, as he said, having fun in Formula 1 again. But fun means to him to be competitive. “
On the subject of matching items
Vettel starts the 2021 season after having had his worst season in F1 last year. However, Szafnauer said he clearly saw his star driver’s desire for success and expected the team to benefit from Vettel’s partnership with Lance Stroll.
“His attitude here is that he wants to keep racing when it can be fun,” said Szafnauer.
“For him, having fun means being competitive. For him, having fun means working really hard and getting every performance out of a car and achieving what the team can do and being a big part of it. He is highly motivated.
“I think he and Lance will be a great partnership. Seb is very experienced, but by no means over the hill at the age of 33 and Lance is much younger and on the learning curve, but very fast of course, so I think this combination suits us very well. “
The post The F1 engineer-like quality that Aston Martin sees in “really hungry” Vettel first appeared on monter-une-startup.
