Vettel: Nonsense to read too much into early wins

Sebastian Vettel is reading little into his and Ferrari's spectacular early-season form, which has yielded two wins from as many races, as he expects the development race with Mercedes and Red Bull to decide the destination of honours in 2018.

Victories in Australia and Bahrain provide Vettel with a fine omen - a driver has not won the opening two races of an F1 season and not gone on to win the championship since 1982.

However, with a packed 21-race schedule meaning a season's worth of races remain, Vettel is not getting carried away.

"I think we have so many races nowadays that it's as long, long way," Vettel said.

"I think it's important if you want to fight for the championship to score a lot of points every race. The more, the better, but at this point it's nonsense to be even thinking of where you might be.

"Obviously there's a lot of work ahead of us. The train is leaving. Everybody is putting on new parts and improving their cars, so we need to make sure we're on that train amongst those teams that will be strong also at the end of the season.

"That, I think, will be key to fight for the championship."

A smart pitstop under the Virtual Safety Car in Australia and Vettel's stamina on lifeless soft tyres in Bahrain have give Ferrari's strategy a winning sheen so far in 2018.

Vettel added: "I don't think it has anything to do with being smart. I think we know our numbers, and I think — not to go in detail too much and get lost. I think some of the systems we have can be a bit tricky. I think every team is aware of that.

"Then I think for Bahrain obviously we had a different plan going into the race, but we wanted to win, so we had to change it, and it worked out.

"I think in the position that we were we, in a way, had nothing to lose — falling back to third was the worst possible result — so we took the risk and it paid off.

"I don't think here was anything Mercedes could've done massively different. In the end we did everything we could, we did everything right, and that was important."