Ferrari staff members were "annoyed" by Sebastian Vettel after he joined from Red Bull, according to the team's former press officer.
A Ferrari team in decline was excited to sign a driver of Vettel's calibre when he joined ahead of the 2015 season. But Alberto Antonini, who joined the team around the same time, has revealed that it wasn't long before the delight turned into despair.
In an appearance on the GoF1 Show , the former journalist revealed Vettel was overly curious and set in his ways from his time at Red Bull. This made him want to make drastic changes to the way the team operated – which did not go down well with everybody else.
"He did everything he had to do at Red Bull," said Antonini. "People tend to forget that he won four world championships in a row. With Red Bull, he probably had the right environment for him. When he came along at Ferrari, we joined the team virtually together at the end of 2014.
"He just started, I'm going to be blunt, annoying some people by telling them 'that's not the way we did it at Red Bull' and they’d say 'you're not at Red Bull now, you're at Ferrari'. He also clashed, in a way, with the reality of such a big company where everything has to be gauged because you're always worried about the consequences of what you do."
Antonini went on to talk about the 2017 and 2018 season, which saw Ferrari challenge Mercedes for the title. But they fell short in both years, following which there was even further decline in standards which ultimately culminated in a historically poor sixth-placed finish in 2020.
He added: "In 2018, I want to be absolutely honest with you. When the season started, at the shakedown, which normally used control tyres, Sebastian drove the car for the first time. He's not supposed to be looking for the big lap times that day, but he felt there was something wrong with the car. The car was too light on the front end. The car was not a winner from the start, it was worked on to become a winner. Sebastian was very, very keen to go for it."
A crash at the German Grand Prix that year was pointed out as the beginning of the end for Vettel with Ferrari, as he handed the win and control of the title race to Lewis Hamilton. "That did affect him, psychologically. He probably lost confidence in that," said Antonini.
"I don't blame [Sebastian] for everything that happened there, because he's been taking too much criticism and I don't think he deserves all that. The situation was far more complicated than it looked and it was not down to driver errors what happened in those two seasons. It was really difficult to take it to the end and it fizzled out... it wasn't just the driver, it was the whole team."
