Sebastian Vettel has stressed that Ferrari is keeping track with its planned development path, in the wake of having been defeated across the past three Grands Prix.
Vettel won in Belgium before Ferrari locked out the front row of the grid in Italy, though was beaten by Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton in the race.
Hamilton added to that win with further success in Singapore and Russia, in the process extending his title advantage over Vettel to 50 points.
When asked whether Ferrari had lost technical direction of late, he shot back: “How do you know about our technical direction?
“Sorry, but I don’t think it’s true; I don’t think we lost direction.
“We made progress with our cars, the steps that we planned, the steps have been coming.
“Now, you never know where you are in comparison to others, maybe they have done smaller steps or bigger steps, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure speaking to all our engineers that we are where we would like to be or where we wanted to be.
“Of course you would like to be always further with more performance, but that’s the same for everyone.”
Vettel must overhaul Hamilton at a rate of 10 points per race if he is to wrestle back control of the 2018 title, but downplayed that it is a case of ‘now or never’ in the scrap.
“I don’t like the now or never approach, I don’t think there’s much sense in that,” he said.
“I think you attack every weekend, every weekend is different, the track is different, the circumstances are different, so I’m very happy to be here.
“I love this track, it’s my favourite track in the world, so I’d better enjoy it and not spoil it by starting to count the things that are against me and focus on the things that are working for me.”
Vettel last won at Suzuka in 2013 while competing for Red Bull.
