Blaming Ocon for that incident is so typical Vettel.
Last year I made an elaborate post about Vettel's tendency to deflect his own mistakes onto others. This is another one to add to the list.
He too often delusionally refuses to accept blame and shifts it to someone who's mostly innocent. He thinks he can shift public perception, and sometimes this has worked.
Vettel at Aston Martin was supposed to be a fresh start, to shed the negativity off him. I just cannot believe that it took him only 1 race to go back to his usual doings. He'll never learn.
Disclaimer: it will be a long post, my apologies in advance.
Vettel's case is a curious one. On the one hand, he is a four-time WDC with the 3rd most career wins in the sport's history. He is also the youngest driver to win the title ever, as of now.
But on the other hand, I have always thought that he is an overachiever, and his talent/skills are not truly represented by his former success.
Now, I know it's the internet. No matter how I put it, how carefully I phrase it, people will jump, get offended, and ignore whatever I write as a disclaimer. Obviously, Vettel has talent and is a much better driver than most of the drivers in the history of the sport. Nobody gets a top drive without talent, and nobody wins races, let alone titles without talent.
But there are arguably some differences in terms of how impressive champions or legacies are, and I don't think Vettel would be ahead of Prost in terms of race wins, or he would be behind only Schumacher, Hamilton and Fangio in terms of WDC titles purely on merit. But as I said, I know full well that people who want to take offence at my opinion will ignore what I mentioned about him being obviously talented, so we might as well just jump into the nitty-gritty.
Vettel always struck me as a driver who needs special circumstances to shine. The best package overall through a season, a slower/unfortunate teammate, privileged situation within the team, and not being in traffic.
I never felt that Vettel was your "driver's driver". He doesn't shine in a wheel to wheel battle. Unlike other multiple champions and decorated legends of the sport, such as Prost, Schumacher, Alonso Hamilton, Senna, Stewart, Clark, Lauda or Mansell, he doesn't have wins that make you think how on Earth he pulled that off, regarding the circumstances. To me, his most memorable wins would be 2013 Germany and 2015 Malaysia because, on both occasions, he managed to beat faster cars ultimately. But these are only two wins out of fifty-three.
Ultimately, there are three reasons why I think it is clear Vettel's successes led to people believe for a while that he was better than he really is:
1) Wins from low grid positions (or rather, the lack thereof)
2) His performance as defending champion in a year when he loses the title fight
3) His performance against strong teammates
Let's look at these points in detail.
1) This one really is a striking and telling piece of statistics. Out of his fifty-three wins, Vettel never won a single race when starting from lower than 3rd - and even that happened only six times. In other words, Vettel needed to start from the first row 89% of the times he managed to win the race.
For comparison, let's take a look at the aforementioned all-time greats, Prost, Schumacher, Alonso, Hamilton, Senna, Stewart, Clark, Lauda and Mansell, how they fared in this respect.
Prost: 51 wins with 16 wins (31,4%) starting from lower than 3rd
Schumacher: 91 wins with 7 wins (7,7%) starting from lower than 3rd
Alonso: 32 wins with 8 wins (25%) starting from lower than 3rd
Hamilton: 96 wins with 6 wins (6,3%) starting from lower than 3rd
Senna: 41 wins with 7 wins (17%) starting from lower than 3rd
Stewart: 27 wins with 8 wins (29,6%) starting from lower than 3rd
Clark: 25 wins with 4 wins (16%) starting from lower than 3rd
Lauda: 25 wins with 9 wins (36%) starting from lower than 3rd
Mansell: 31 wins with 4 wins (12,9%) starting from lower than 3rd
As you can see, some greats won more races when starting from lower, and some won less. But Vettel is the only driver with at least 25 wins in the sport's history who never managed to win even a single race when starting lower than 3rd. Astonishing.
2) Another quite telling piece of statistics is that out of the 13 drivers who won more than 1 title since 1962, Vettel is the only one who couldn't win a single race as defending champion in a year when he couldn't defend his title. In other words, even though they couldn't defend their title, all other multiple WDCs won at least one race as defending champions.
Let's look at these historic pieces of statistics in chronological order:
Hill
Title years: 1962, 1968
Wins in the year(s) losing the title as defending champion: 3 (2 in 1963, 1 in 1969)
Clark
Title years: 1963, 1965
Wins in the year(s) losing the title as defending champion: 4 (3 in 1964, 1 in 1966)
Stewart
Title years: 1969, 1971, 1973
Wins in the year(s) losing the title as defending champion: 5 (1 in 1970, 4 in 1972)
Note that Stewart retired at the end of the 1973 season.
Fittipaldi
Title years: 1972, 1974
Wins in the year(s) losing the title as defending champion: 5 (3 in 1973, 2 in 1975)
Lauda
Title years: 1975, 1977, 1984
Wins in the year(s) losing the title as defending champion: 8 (5 in 1976, 2 in 1978 and 1 in 1985)
Piquet
Title years: 1981, 1983, 1987
Wins in the year(s) losing the title as defending champion: 3 (1 in 1982, 2 in 1984)
Note that 1988 is the only other year since 1963 when the defending champion couldn't win a single race.
Prost
Title years: 1985, 1986, 1989, 1993
Wins in the year(s) losing the title as defending champion: 8 (3 in 1987, 5 in 1990)
Note that Prost retired at the end of the 1993 season.
Senna
Title years: 1988, 1990, 1991
Wins in the year(s) losing the title as defending champion: 9 (6 in 1989, 3 in 1992)
Schumacher
Title years: 1994, 1995, 2000-2004
Wins in the year(s) losing the title as defending champion: 4 (3 in 1996, 1 in 2005)
Hakkinen
Title years: 1998, 1999
Wins in the year(s) losing the title as defending champion: 4 (2000)
Alonso
Title years: 2005, 2006
Wins in the year(s) losing the title as defending champion: 4 (2007)
Hamilton
Title years: 2008, 2014, 2015, 2017-2020
Wins in the year(s) losing the title as defending champion: 12 (2 in 2009, 10 in 2016)
Should Hamilton end up losing the title for the ongoing 2021 season, he already won this year, so Vettel would still be the only driver in almost 60 years who couldn't win a single race in the year(s) when the said driver was a defending champion but lost the title fight.
Now, I know what arguments a few people will throw in, so let me counter them in advance.
a) "It's not fair, Vettel only had one year like that, while many others had multiple ones."
True. But firstly, more years as defending champion means more chances that one slips up and can't win a single race. Apart from that, Hakkinen and Alonso also only had one year like that. Still, it didn't prevent them from winning multiple races.
b) "It's not fair, the Mercs dominated 2014, the only year when Vettel lost the title as a defending champion."
True. However, the Mercedes domination didn't prevent Vettel's teammate, Ricciardo, to win 3 races. It's telling that whenever Mercedes dropped the ball, it was Ricciardo who was there to pick the pieces up and not his established, 4-time WDC teammate. Besides, it was the same team Vettel enjoyed his successes with before. Many champions listed above switched teams and sometimes even ended up with inferior equipment, still managed to win multiple races (Stewart in 1970, Lauda in 1978, Prost in 1990, Schumacher in 1996, Alonso in 2007).
c) "It's not fair, Schumacher's sole win from 2005 was because of the infamous tyre-gate at Indianapolis."
True. However, Schumacher already proved in 1996 that he could do what Vettel couldn't, even though Vettel's teammate proved multiple times that the RB10 could win races. Also, even if Schumacher couldn't have won that particular US Grand Prix in 2005, the pattern is clear: 12 multiple champions since 1962, in 23 seasons as defending champions who ended up losing the title, still managing to win at least one race per season as defending champions.
d) "It's not fair; Piquet also had a year as defending champion when he couldn't win a race."
True. But refer to a). Multiple years when the title defence is unsuccessful also means multiple chances where the defending champion might not win a single race. Also, Piquet had two other seasons in 1982 and 1984 where he proved he could do what Vettel couldn't. His 1988 Lotus 100T was nothing like the RB10 in 2014 in terms of competitiveness. The RB10 was arguably the 2nd best car of 2014, which was able to score 3 wins and 12 podiums in total, whereas the Lotus 100T was 4th in the WCC with 0 wins and 3 podiums.
3) 2014 is also a peculiar season where we saw how a team rookie thoroughly beat and outscored the established 4-time WDC star driver. Vettel was the defending champion, having won 4 titles on the trot. He was in the team that had built around him, he was driving a car that was designed with him in mind, and he was only 26 at that time.
The beating he got from Ricciardo (238-167 in points, 12-7 in qualifications, 11-3 in races, 8-4 in podiums, 3-0 in wins) was, to put it mildly, decisive and demoralising. No other established, multiple champions in the history of the sport got beaten by a team rookie, and certainly not in that fashion. 2014 was the first stark indication that Vettel massively overachieved in the previous years.
This scenario (being unable to win a single race when the team rookie wins several ones; getting outscored by 42.5%; achieving only half the amount of the teammate's podiums) never happened to any other multiple champions in the history of the sport before or since either.
Many tried to defend Vettel with various half-cooked arguments, but the same thing happened to him when Leclerc joined Ferrari and quickly gained the upper hand. And although 2020 was a brutal beating again, this time, it wasn't as much of a shock since Vettel's stock was considerably lower by 2019. But Leclerc beating Vettel basically confirmed that 2014 was not just a one-off. It also turned out since that infamous 2014 season that Ricciardo, while unquestionably a top driver, is most probably not even on the level of the likes of Hamilton, Verstappen, Alonso–or Leclerc, for that matter, who duly beat Vettel even more thoroughly than Ricciardo did back in 2014 (14-3 in qualifying, 10-3 in races, 98-33 in points).
All this led to yet another scenario that was unprecedented in the history of the sport: a 33-year-old multiple champion's team want him gone. The team are not offering him a contract extension, and no front-running team want to sign him either, which leads to discussions about whether he would retire. Vettel's career was basically saved by Aston Martin as he was not on the shopping list of any of the big teams. In fact, Horner, Wolff and Brown all specifically said that they not even entertained the idea of signing Vettel. Ouch.
A 33-year-old multiple WDC is a pariah as far as the big teams are concerned - not that's something that would have been unthinkable with the likes of Prost or Senna or Schumacher or Hamilton or Alonso - aka the real and true greats of the sport. I stand by my opinion that Vettel is probably the weakest multiple-time champion in the history of the sport, whose CV is definitely more impressive than it would have been purely on merit.