Sebastian Vettel says there is no need to panic about Red Bull's form in Oz

The world champion had headed into the weekend as favourite to carry over his dominant form from last season - but in the end found himself down in sixth on the grid.

But although the situation is far from ideal, Vettel thinks that it is far too early to feel that his Red Bull Racing team needs to do anything different from what it has in the past.

"Maybe for here it is a different situation but for the rest it is still to come," he said in Australia. "I think it is still early days and it would be wrong to start panicking and reviewing every aspect of the car and every area because I think because the way we have worked has not been bad the last couple of years. Nevertheless we learned that we are not quick enough and that is what we want to change."

Vettel did not appear too comfortable with his car throughout practice and qualifying, but he does not think that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the RB8.

"I don't think we have a global problem in the car, I don't think that is the weakness," he explained. "I think it is more getting to it rather than changing the whole car, so there is no reason to panic.

"On Friday we had very little running and I wasn't happy with the balance, this morning it looked a bit better. Obviously it doesn't help that I went off, but equally it isn't as if you can test a million things in one hour so you try and prepare for qualifying.

"In qualifying you can't really do much apart from play with the front wing and diff, so, as I said, going into this weekend we would have loved to have more track time but we need to make sure we learn a lot in the race and that will help us a lot for the next races."

Vettel says that he is actually not too shocked by what has happened - with the pace of the cars over the Australian weekend fitting in with what had been seen in winter testing.

"It has turned out as we expected, Ferrari really seems to be in trouble and Mercedes has definitely caught up, they look very competitive and McLaren we always said look strong. They look very consistent, they did not take the fuel out in testing just to do a lap time for show.

"Lotus had the potential to surprise which they did, so no surprises in that regard. We would love to be higher up ourselves and maybe that is a little bit of a surprise but I feel it in the car and we understand that we are not yet at our limit."