Vettel: Ground-effect cars at Imola a throwback to 1980's

The German was speaking in a team's press release ahead of this week's race and said: "Imola is a real test of driver and machine, and that's what every F1 circuit should be.

"It's hard to imagine we'd ever be racing around Imola in ground-effect cars – that's really something special, and a bit of a throwback to the 1980s, which is cool," he added.

Vettel missed the first two races this season after contacting Covid-19, and his return race in Australia was a nightmare, as he suffered from reliability problems, as well crashing in practice and the race - his race crash causing a DNF - as he tried to get to grips with the woeful car Aston Martin have built, the AMR22.

"I'm looking forward to getting back into the car and getting up to speed," he revealed. "Imola has never hosted a Sprint race before, so I'm also excited to see how that plays out."

Vettel's team boss Mike Krack reflected on the team's troubles with the media after their disastrous Melbourne weekend, where Lance Stroll was also crashing all over the place, and tried to offer his insight on how he planned to sort the problems out.

He said: "Let's put it like this: you clearly need to identify who works on which process, who is doing what, which, obviously when you are away to [go] racing, you have a little bit less of an insight than you would have if you have, for example, a three month period at the factory to start with.

"Now, to identify a weakness, I think it's clearly the performance of the car, and how we have to improve that is something that we will need to look [at] in the next weeks again," Krack added.

He revealed that he will be talking to the team's new Technical Director Dan Fallows, whom they scooped from Red Bull, and said: "We'll have to sit together and identify clearly how we develop the car, how we develop the performance, and how we develop the structure of the team."

"It's new, I think it's [been] six weeks or seven weeks by now, so it's still new," Krack explained. "But also here, it's up to me to take the necessary steps to talk to the most people, try to identify where we are, where we have to improve and move on.

"Again, I'm not the kind of guy that looks for excuses here," the Aston Martin team principal insisted.

Aston Martin are enduring a horrible start to their season, currently last in the Constructors' Championship, being the only team yet to score points in 2022, with no signs of improvement yet whatsoever, as they head into the fourth race of the season at Imola.