Nico Rosberg says Sebastian Vettel’s championship bid has faltered due to his mistakes and Ferrari’s reluctance to use team orders.

Rosberg, who beat Hamilton to the 2016 world championship before retiring, told the official F1 website Vettel’s championship bid “hasn’t gone very well for him.”

“It’s all about consistency and he’s done the opposite. He’s been all over the place, really, in the last couple of months. Him and the team both together. It’s been so one-sided since the summer it’s unbelievable.

“It was seemingly going to be Vettel who would take the championship and it’s just gone completely one direction, been total dominance, since. And just as a result of mistakes. And you’re never going to beat Lewis like that because Lewis doesn’t make mistakes. Very few.”

Vettel suffered costly spins early in the races at Monza, Suzuka and the Circuit of the Americas after clashes with three different rivals. Rosberg said this showed Vettel was too reluctant to back down.

“It’s difficult to understand because you have to remember he’s a four-times world champion who’s done incredible performances. So I’m not really sure.

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“For me sometimes he wants too much in the moment always and can’t think about the long game. He’s also a little bit too self-confident sometimes. Which means he doesn’t accept when someone else has, in that moment, maybe done a better job. You need to kind of accept, take a step back, [say] ‘yep, the other guy’s better in this moment and I’ll get him back again a little but further down the road’.

“Somehow there’s a little bit of that in there. But it’s a strange one. I’m sure he can do a lot better than he’s done in the last couple of months because he is one of the best drivers out there but he has not been showing that in recent months.”

Rosberg added it seemed “really strange” to him that Ferrari didn’t use team orders to help Vettel at Suzuka when Mercedes had done so one week earlier in Russia to help Hamilton.

“Kimi [was] fifth, Sebastian sixth. Why the hell didn’t they swap? This is the championship fight, needing every single point out there to somehow keep this thing alive, why didn’t they swap?

“Seriously, I was wondering what on earth is going wrong, what is the reason, it’s fifth and sixth place, swap the damn cars around. After all we’ve seen from Mercedes, and give Sebastian two points extra. Two points, he needs those. Like, crazy. Who’s going to explain that to me?

“That I don’t understand at all. But that is maybe a little indication of a bigger problem and that maybe has unsettled Sebastian and doesn’t understand why he doesn’t get more support.”

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2018 F1 season