Monaco was Sebastian Vettel’s 100th Grand Prix but it proved to be a race to forget for the four-time world champion.
A year ago he finished second on the streets of the principality, a rare blip on an otherwise unblemished season and he went on to win 11 of the remaining 13 Grands Prix.
His 2014 campaign to date has been the polar opposite. Following a problem with his car’s energy recovery system in qualifying on Saturday, which meant he could not discharge the full power available with any great consistency, his race – after a promising start – came to a premature end after seven laps when a power unit glitch saw him stuck in first gear.
Luck has gone Vettel’s way for the past four years so it was inevitable that it would run out at some point and he could be forgiven for currently feeling cursed.
Winter testing was terrible, the Renault power unit woefully unreliable and the season opener was a disaster – software issues curtailing him in practice, qualifying and the race.
In fact, reliability issues have been littered across the season. At the last race in Barcelona a wiring loom fault effectively erased his chances of any running time in Friday practice and then a gearbox change dropped him five places on the grid.
But he drove from 15th place to an impressive fourth by the race finish, a result that led Red Bull team principal Christian Horner to declare that his driver “had his mojo back”.
Along with his litany of car complaints, the Vettel mojo – or rather the apparent lack of it – has been another big issue.
When in past seasons he has been seemingly invincible, he has now finished the last four races behind his teammate Daniel Ricciardo (below).
It has led some people to question Vettel’s true pace and talent, and ponder how good a benchmark Mark Webber was as a team-mate.
But such an outlook is way too simplistic when considering the complex manner in which Vettel likes his car to be set up and how he drives it.
Red Bull’s biggest loss in performance to Mercedes has been as a result of the banning of rear exhaust blowing, a system whereby the team managed airflow towards the rear of the car better than any other team, thereby giving it greater downforce.
It was a system that Webber with his type of driving style never or at least rarely truly mastered. Vettel had it down to a tee.
He would effectively destabilise the rear of the car entering a corner but then avoid the back end coming out by getting back on the throttle at exactly the right time, allowing the exhaust gases to flow over the rear of the car and effectively enable it to stick to the track.
Such a tactic has been made illegal for this season but Vettel started the year with roughly the same driving style. It meant the back end of his Red Bull would slide more than most and his tyre wear was substantially higher than that of Ricciardo.
Red Bull technical guru Adrian Newey was confident that such a driving style would eventually reap the benefits as he and the rest of the team eventually understood the complete machinations of the new engines and their altered energy recovery systems as well as the increased torque.
But that has not materialised and Vettel has been particularly affected by the torque delivery and thereby the driveability.
The sense was that the German had turned the corner in that regard in Spain by adapting his style but unfortunately he never found out if that was the case in Monaco, so short-lived was his race.
Monaco is a great leveller of pace although the manner in which Lewis Hamilton was able to pull away in the venue’s iconic tunnel from a fast-pursuing Ricciardo would suggest that Vettel will still be some way off the pace however well he masters the new nuances of his Red Bull when racing resumes in Canada in two weekend’s time.
It is a race he won a year ago but, barring a problem with the two Mercedes, it is not one he can aspire to win this time around. The frustration has been apparent from Vettel although, knowing how the winter went, things could be considerably worse.
There has been one major positive in recent days with the news that Newey, who for the umpteenth time was approached with a bigmoney offer to join Ferrari, has opted to stay at Red Bull.
He will be obsessing how to cut the gap to Mercedes and get Vettel back where he belongs, at the front.
