Vettel’s Ferrari move will shape his place in F1 history
On the eve of this year’s Japanese Grand Prix, Sebastian Vettel asked to speak privately with Christian Horner. The four-time world champion had a bombshell to deliver: he was leaving Red Bull Racing at the season’s end.
Seeking to regain control of a negative situation, the following morning Horner announced to the press that Vettel was joining Ferrari, while Helmut Marko has since repeated that claim. Contractual issues may be delaying the official announcement, but we can take the Red Bull bosses’ statements as confirmation that Seb is Maranello-bound for 2015.
Vettel's switch to the Scuderia will draw comparisons with his friend and mentor Michael Schumacher, who made the same move in 1996. While Michael was re-writing the F1 record books between 2000 and 2004, Seb was a teenager making his way through the karting ranks. Seeing his fellow countryman dominate in the famous red machine must have left its mark on the young Vettel.
Of course, the Ferrari legend runs much deeper than Schumacher. They are the oldest team in F1 and have fielded some of the sport’s greatest competitors: Lauda, Villeneuve and Prost are just three of the heavyweight names to have won in their cars.
But Vettel's motivation cannot be borne entirely of childhood nostalgia and a desire to emulate his idol. He is an intensely driven and fiercely competitive man who will have first made this decision with his head, and only then allowed his heart to follow.
Red Bull are in transition. Before Vettel’s departure was confirmed, it was announced that his long-time race engineer, Guillaume 'Rocky' Rocquelin, is to become the team’s head of race engineering, ending a relationship that has yielded four world titles and 38 wins.
Even more significant is the fact that technical director Adrian Newey is scaling back his involvement with the race team. The Briton is among the greatest designers in Formula 1 history, responsible for more than a dozen world championships, and losing his day-to-day influence will hurt Red Bull.
There is also the nagging belief that Vettel owes his success to the brilliance of Newey's cars. Though he had to fight hard for the 2010 and '12 titles, Seb’s triumphs in 2011 and '13 were comparative strolls in the park thanks to vastly superior machinery.
By moving to Ferrari, and perhaps more importantly out of Newey's shadow, Vettel has a chance to prove that he is the chief architect of his achievements. The Scuderia have a very good technical department, but you could not compare it with Newey. If Seb can succeed away from Red Bull, it will silence those who believe he has been flattered by his equipment.
He may also have wished to exit Red Bull while his stock is still high after a season in which he has been outperformed by team-mate Daniel Ricciardo. Following the US Grand Prix, the Australian had three wins to Vettel's zero and led his team-mate by 65 points. Ricciardo has emerged as a star this season; by contrast, Seb has been surprisingly anonymous.
Vettel can be excused a sub-par campaign: he has just won four successive titles and has every right to be mentally drained. But were Ricciardo's dominance to continue for a second year, questions would be asked about Seb’s status as an F1 great.
Kimi Raikkonen
Things should not be as difficult at Ferrari, where his team-mate will almost certainly be Kimi Raikkonen. Given how badly the Finn has compared with Fernando Alonso this term, Seb will surely be confident of having the upper hand.
Which brings us on to Alonso, the man Seb looks set to replace at the Scuderia. Could there also be an element of ‘getting one over’ the Spaniard? The two have a famously prickly relationship, an inevitable outcome of fighting tooth-and-nail for world titles in 2010 and ‘12.
Alonso has spent five years trying to drag Ferrari to a world title but has ultimately come up short. His misery would be compounded if he were forced to watch Vettel rock up at his old team and achieve the success that he couldn't. For Seb, it would be the final victory over his fiercest F1 rival.
But while these reasons may have influenced Vettel’s decision, they are all driven by his ultimate desire: to win races and world titles. He will surely achieve this aim at some stage, because Ferrari simply cannot keep getting it wrong for much longer. How quickly he does so will not only be fascinating to watch – it will also shape Vettel's place in F1 history.
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