gibells wrote:I think a certain blue and white individual in the south is going off his nut.
It was a great experience. The script could not have been written better by anybody who wanted drama, excitement and poetic justice in the end.
I have followed Seb Vettel since he came to BMW in 2006. In 2007 he got Speed's seat in the Newey designed Toro Rosso and quickly showed what was possible with those cars. He put the STR on P4 in China and I've been a fan ever since. I remember that I've changed my sig on the day to celebrate the occasion.
Monza 2008 was another high point for us Vettel fans and it gave Red Bull the first race win at all. It did not come from the vastly experienced DC or the highly rated Webber in the Red Bull racing team that had all the money. The almost rookie in the ex Minardi team without almost any resources of a top team grabbed the opportunity in an all wet race weekend to put the inferior car on pole and won the race from pole to finish. This was no small feat. There is no doubt that Reikkonen, Massa, Alonso, Hamilton, Kubica, Heidfeld, DC and Webber had better cars that year and should have won that race. I remember shivers running down my neck when I heard the German national anthem followed by the Italian being played out to the red sea of the tifosi. It was an unforgettable moment.
2009 was a difficult year for Seb because although the RB5 was much improved over the STR it also was a fragile design - as any Newey creation - and he had to take the leadership of the team due to Mark Webber's injury. It was a pretty big job for a young man fighting for a championship only in his second full year in F1 at 22 yo. Seb did very well against the more experienced campaigners and finished runner up in a car that was only second best. He collected more race wins on the way and dominated his experienced team mate. So when the RB6 came out most people expected him to take the fight to Ferrari and McLaren this year.
Seb did not disappoint us but the technical gremlins conspired against him. A spark plug failure in Bahrain and a loose wheel in Australia cost him two consecutive race wins and 38 points while he was leading the race from just the first two races. The series of failures continued with brake failure in Spain, chassis cracks in Monaco and a loose anti roll bar with consequential collapsing of the rear suspension in Q3 inTurkey. It really was a season of fighting uphill all the time against massive disappointment. At that time both Red Bull drivers had 78 points but Seb really should have had at least 116 without the problems in the first two races. The team quite rightly could still expect more from him than from Mark Webber considering the better qualifying performance and the bad reliability luck. As Mark Webber put it quite aptly the points equality of the Red Bull drivers was surprising to the team. He thought it was inconvenient. I thought it was simply unexpected and based on performance comparison it was unearned.
The situation exploded in the Istanbul crash between the two Red Bull drivers. The media, without any knowledge what had really happened were quick to blame Seb but the team's final verdict was shared blame. In actual fact none of the two drivers should probably be blamed for the crash. IMO it was caused by the team tactics gone wrong and the resulting confusion on the team radio. Quite obviously by the testimony of Helmut Marko the team wanted Seb to pass Mark without a fight for position. It is a known fact that this tactical instruction wasn't relayed to Mark Webber by his race engineer Ciaron Pilbeam. Ciaron instead told Mark to "Push the boost button". This was obviously a coded message to expect a fight for position. We do not know what was communicated to Seb Vettel by his engineer Rocky, but the confusion was obvious by the hand gesture after the crash happened. From the air box cameras of the drivers we also know that Seb passed Mark on the inside and his right rear wheel collided with Marks left front wheel. Mark held his line and denied Seb the clean racing line into turn 12. Seb was steering right and was pushing for the racing line while his nose was almost a wheel base ahead of Mark's. The most logical explanation isn't a mistake by Seb. I have been convinced from day one that he was told he would gain position without a fight while Mark was told he had to fight him. This sorry affair was a big weight on his shoulders. He was pushed into a spoiled child role by the media and a clever PR strategy by the Webber camp. I felt that Seb indeed had been the faster Red Bull driver all weekend - as long as his car was not broken - and that the team tactic at that point could be justified by his better shape for the top speed in the final phase of the race. From Istanbul on the Red Bull team tactic was changed. Mark Webber insisted that both team mates had the right to fight for position at all times and the team confirmed that view.
I thought that Seb did a pretty good job after the massive disappointment of going away with zero points from a race that should have yielded at least 18 points if not a race victory. After all without the suspension failure in Q3 the whole sorry affair would not have happened at all. McLaren at this time of the season had the best car and the Red Bull drivers went through a hard patch in Canada. Valencia then saw Mark Webber making a big mistake and Seb taking the team internal lead with another great race win. At this time Hamilton was secure in the over all lead of the championship. Next came the Silverstone debacle.
Again Seb was caught out by the gremlins when his new wing's nose box failed in FP3, probably due to the severe bumps causing cracks in the fastening mechanism. And again Seb was made the fall guy by the Webber PR machine and the prejudiced international media. The facts were rather simple and do not justify the artificial scandal in my view. Newey had developed a new front wind that twisted easily and gave good support to an early turn in driving style. This was much better suited to Seb's style of driving than Mark's. It was no surprise that Seb had accumulated a lot more miles in FP1, FP2 and FP3 with the new nose box when the failure happened. He had fully embraced the new development that complimented his style while Mark was still sitting on the fence not knowing if it would ultimately make him faster. I believe the whole team knew that Seb Vettel would profit by more pace while on Mark's car the use wasn't even decided for the rest of the weekend. The remaining wing was taken to the factory in Milton Keynes to be checked for suspected cracks that could have caused the failure on Seb's car but was cleared before qualifying. Those are facts that can be checked. Then the team management had another communication cock up. They allocated the wing to Seb's car and not back to Mark's as one would naturally expect. The reasons that were later given for the decision are quite sensible IMO but they were not properly communicated. Seb had made the better use of the wing in FP3 and was ahead in the championship. There was also the unspoken point that the wing was more likely to give him a performance boost than Mark which may have played a big role for Adrian Newey. At that point he was getting much more feed back from Seb on the crucial development of the flex wing than from Mark. If Red Bull wanted to max out their team performance they had to give the wing to Seb under the circumstances as he was likely to gain more pace than Mark from it. We all know that once again Mark cried wolf and publicly accused the team of giving him inferior material. In my view that wasn't justified. The team had good reason to do what they did and he should have kept his mouth shut and cleared the issue internally. By creating the artificial scandal once again the international media were brought up against Sebastian. It was creating tremendous psychological pressure on him from inside the team which was totally unnecessary. In the race Seb had a start problem that both Red Bull drivers had pretty much frequently dureing the middle of the season and got bogged down. He lost pole in Cobs corner to Mark and had a collision with Hamilton who was too aggressively steering away from the apex of the corner in my view. Seb was ahead of him and could not see that he came out behind Mark's car. So they had this unfortunate racing accident and Seb had to drive a whole lap on three wheels with a damaged tyre to join the race in last position. I think he did a brilliant job of getting himself back up to seventh place. He passed most of the back markers and mid fielders on track although some positions were gifted to him by the safety car. He fought with total racing spirit and never gave up to the end to take the final position only in the last lap from Adrian Sutil. I thought it was his best race in terms of passing other cars from behind in a season where it was extremely difficult for the Red Bull drivers to pass anything from Force India over Renault or even Mercedes cars. The aerodynamic superiority of the Red Bull only works in clean air and behind they simply suffer from lack of grunt. Again Seb had to look back at a race where he had given all but he was caught out by unreliability and bad luck in the race for his team mate to go away with the spoils of victory and him painted the spoilt child. I felt very depressed and was surprised how well he coped with it.
Gemany was another race which did not go to plan. Seb took another pole position to be let down by a clutch issue at the start. The team confirmed that the clutch was worn or damaged and that made him loose another start to the Ferraris and cost him good points. The next race in Hungary his car worked perfect. He took pole position once again and the team made a perfect tyre stop before the safety car struck. Later it transpired that Red Bull once again had an issue with team tactics gone wrong. Mark was running in P1 without tyre stop and Seb in P2 with the stop completed. The tactic was obviously having Seb backing up the field while Mark was supposed to get a head start after the restart. It was a sensible plan. Unfortunately Seb failed to take the relatively new safety car rule from 2008 into account. Only the leader can back away from the safety car on the restart lap. The second and all following drivers have to keep the distance to not more than ten car lengths. Seb didn't remember and Rocky did not warn him although the tactic was obviously prone to such an error. It was a small error to forget that part of the regulation but the punishment was loss of another race victory and ten points that would have been his. Seb did not know until the end of the race what went wrong because the team probably did not want to discuss the cocked up team tactic on the radio. He learned about his costly mistake after the race and quickly took the blame on him to cover up for the team tactic. I was impressed how quickly he overcame yet another unfortunate set back and I felt that the stewards leveled a much too harsh penalty on him for the mistake.
Seb's biggest mistake was yet to come. In Spa he made an optimistic passing attempt into bus stop on Button that went wrong. Three points complicated that pass. The track was getting wet and was bumpy. And finally the new twist wing induced oversteer in such an extreme situation. Seb judged it wrong and collected Button while he fought the car to get back some control. Again the stewards came harder down on him than any other driver with a drive through penalty for an avoidable collision. In other cases of avoidable collisions the stewards decided not to award a penalty in 2010 or did not even investigate. Obviously McLaren made a strong protest and the sympathy of the stewards was on their side. For me that was another deep point of the season but Seb collected himself and the rest was flawless in my mind. His Monza engine #7 was down on qualifying power and he had a strange brake failure that cost him positions in the race. But a good tyre strategy made up for that and he made up some ground compared to Mark. In Singapore his qualifying with engine #7 again wasn't the strongest but good enough to beat the team mate and get another good race result.
The final run from Japan to Abu Dhabi really is the icing on the cake of the most fiercely fought season for many years. Seb never put another foot wrong. He always put his car on pole and should have won all the races. But in Yeongam the team made an unfortunate engine decision. Instead of using engine #8 again or engine #7 they put him on #6 which he had used in Germany and Spa. The Renault engine like all the V8s has a resonance frequency around 14,000 rpm. Contrary to the other engines the conrod design of the Renault wasn't up to the standard milage in the 14,000 rpm rev band. The engine #6 had already run considerable time in Spa in low revs due to the rain and the safety car. In Korea it collected massive resonance stresses again by running in low revs behind the safety car in the rain. It caused metal fatigue to conrod #4 of the engine at just 1600 km. This was comparable with running 2600 km of a normal race rev mix. It was the third race victory that Seb lost due to technical failure while leading a race. In this case it was really a heart breaking drama because he was on track to take over the championship lead. As it turned out it wasn't to be. His tally of lost points due to technical failure while leading a race was increased to a whopping 63 points. This was particularly damaging because his team mate did not loose a single point in such a situation to technical failure. Instead Mark Webber lost his car on a wet curb, crashed into the barrier, went without breaking backwards across the track and collected Nico Rosberg in the process. In my and some other people's view the collision could have been avoided but it wasn't even investigated. Another example of race control and the stewards measuring with two different standards. Seb put a brave face to the catastrophe and worked harder on himself to keep it error free and quick.
The international media continued to favor his team mate. The conventional wisdom by the punters was that Red Bull should now stop the equal treatment and issue team order in favor of Mark Webber although Mark's better point position was clearly the result of much better reliability and not of higher performance. For two races Sebastian had not made a single mistake and was the favorite in all odds to get pole and race victory in the last two races. Mark ran another PR campaign putting pressure on Red Bull by saying he was emotionally disadvantaged. The team answered to that by saying he was trying to swing the media view in his favor and they would not give in to that trick. Dietrich Mateschitz decided that the drivers should both have equal chances to win the title and that they should decide alone if they would help the team mate should the situation arise. IMO that was a brave and wise decision that cannot be praised enough. Seb rose magnificently to the occasion with a pole position and a lights to flag victory in Interlagos. Mark suffered a water leak during the race which inhibited him from attacking Seb from P2 but typical for his good luck he did not loose a single race position to the technical failure which damaged his #8 engine for further race use. The Red Bull 1-2 sealed the WCC and the first wave of joy swept through the Red Bull camp.
In the run up to the championship decider the pressure on Seb to eventually hand a race win to Mark became massive if they would run in 1-2 formation at the end of the race. Seb all but confirmed that he would do what was needed to maximize the team success. He took his head down and had the most brilliant qualifying session of the season for me. The cooling track in the twilight made qualifying a huge problem for the Red Bulls. They had more problems than any other leading car to get heat into the tyres. Both drivers decided to tackle the problem with a similar Q3 strategy but slightly different setup. Mark ran a little less downforce and a stiffer suspension than Seb did. He also decided to carry fuel for six laps and not for five laps as Seb did. Other than that they both decided to make only one run in Q3 because they expected they needed more than one flying lap to get the tyres on temperature. Mark duly did his fastest lap on his third flying lap but Seb had the better setup and felt surprising grip in turn one of his first flying lap. He decided to change the tyre tactic and go for it. It was his fastest lap and more than half a second faster than Mark's. It was completely devastating to Marks championship campaign and finally justified the trust the team had shown in Seb to get the job done. Mark had a mountain to climb to pass Button, Alonso and Hamilton in the race to claim a gifted championship by his team mate. That was quite unlikely to happen. Pretty much everybody thought that Alonso would bag the championship and do it by the illegitimately gained points from Germany. Fate intervened as we know and a season which so far was characterized by the blackest of luck for Seb was turned around by poetic justice. Seb did another flawless job and dutifully won the race. Ferrari screwed up the tyre strategy partly because they became over loaded by covering two Red Bull contenders.
Seb finished the job. He already was the youngest point scorer, youngest pole sitter and youngest race winner in the history of F1 at that point. On that day he became the youngest champion as well. I fail to see why some people do not see the excitement in that racing CV. The young man has done more than anybody could have expected to work hard and succeed in the face of tremendous adversity and bad luck in 2010. He made it by the skin of his teeth and delivered a nail biting finish to a memorable season. I can only conclude that some people have a selective perception when it comes to achievements of drivers who are not native English speakers.
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If I were at that conference and I had a hat, I would have bowed to him.
