Sebastian Vettel believes the time has not yet come to take a "now or never" approach as he looks to overhaul Lewis Hamilton's 50-point championship lead.
The German has only beaten his Mercedes rival once in the last six races with an easy victory in Belgium, otherwise, the consistently strong performances from Hamilton combined with errors by Vettel and Ferrari have left some thinking time is running out on his hopes of a fifth Formula 1 crown.
"I don't like the now or never approach, I don't think there's much sense in that," he said ahead of Sunday's Japanese GP. "We attack every weekend and every weekend is different, tracks are different and circumstances are different.
"Within a week you cannot do too many things differently so we hope that the track suits us better and we have a better weekend than in Russia. I'm very happy to be here, I love this track, it is my favourite track in the world, so I want to enjoy it and not spoil it by starting to count things that are against me. I'll not focus on the things that are against me."
Should Vettel and Ferrari fall short of championship glory, the perception is they'll have done so despite having the best car on the grid for much of the season but the 31-year-old believes that would be an exaggeration.
"We have a strong car but I don't think, against people's opinions, that we had a dominant car at any point this year," he claimed. "It has been very close and very close all year but there were too many races from our side where we were not close enough.
"We've always been very close, in many races close enough to have a good fight [but then there's] a race like last weekend where they could play with us in the race and they had more pace. There were other races in the season where we didn't have the pace that they had."
Also Read:
Finally, the four-time winner in Suzuka also denied suggestions that Ferrari's level of performance had also tailed off compared to Mercedes.
"We haven't lost direction," said Vettel. "We have made progress, the steps that were planned were the steps that came. Maybe they have made bigger or smaller steps. But we are where we wanted to be."
