On paper this is a no-brainer. Sebastian Vettel is a four-time world champion, only Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton have more race wins, at 33 years old he still has plenty of good years left in him and – against all pre-season expectations – he was on the market.
Why wouldn’t Aston Martin want him to headline its works Formula 1 team?
Well, F1 success isn’t earned on paper. It’s earned on track, especially when the going gets tough. And in recent seasons when the going got tough, Vettel’s tended to crack.
In a weird twist of fate Vettel’s farewell Ferrari season is proving ample preparation for his return to the F1 midfield he thought he’d left behind when he graduated from Toro Rosso in 2009. He’s in a Q3-marginal car that is a decent point scorer on its good days and almost without redemption on its bad days.
The problem is there have been more bad days than good for Vettel in that situation.
There was a lazy ‘Vettel can’t race other cars’ rhetoric in his Red Bull days, which felt a little harsh. But it has found a second wind
Vettel can’t be held fully responsible for suffering the worst season of his F1 career, because Ferrari’s backwards step in performance is evident. He has had all manner of problems, too: a brake issue in the season opener, team-mate Charles Leclerc rear-ending him in the Styrian Grand Prix, myriad reliability problems curtailing his practice time at the first Silverstone race and an engine failure in practice at the second.
He had a new chassis in Spain and finished sixth after executing a difficult strategy Ferrari almost fumbled, before Ferrari’s form nosedived in Belgium and Italy.
But within that, there’s evidence of Vettel misfiring. He’s lacked a couple of tenths to Leclerc at most races, a carry-over from the advantage Leclerc seemed to develop over the course of 2019. And Vettel’s speed has never been the issue before.
He’s appeared limp in combat – OK, he lacks a sharp weapon to fight with, but he’s got stuck in races too often. He also spun with a misjudged half-move in the Austrian Grand Prix, and lost it at the start of the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix.
It’s done little to dispel the notion that Vettel has a lot of quality attributes, but is not a great racing driver. There was a lazy ‘Vettel can’t race other cars’ rhetoric in his Red Bull days, which felt a little harsh. But it has found a second wind in this phase of Vettel’s career and now it’s harder to object to.
His 2018 season was particularly bad, starting with a small misjudgement in tricky conditions that had big consequences – crashing out of the lead in the German Grand Prix – but then developing into a clear trend.
First-lap spins in battle in Italy, Japan and the United States contributed further to a title challenge turning into nothing.
Last year, the mistakes were costly on an individual basis. He spun in combat with Lewis Hamilton in Bahrain and allowed Mercedes to inherit victory when Leclerc suffered an engine issue. He went off while leading in Canada and earned himself a penalty for rejoining dangerously, so Hamilton won again.
Vettel calamitously rear-ended Max Verstappen at the British Grand Prix, then he spun on his own in Italy and rejoined in the path of Lance Stroll (pictured below), picking up another penalty and finishing outside the points as Leclerc won on home soil for Ferrari. Vettel was also primarily responsible for the contact that ended his and Leclerc’s race in Brazil.
That’s a major error rate of one in five across two-and-a-half seasons, which is simply too much. It’s reached a point of parody – Daniel Ricciardo joked that his own mistake at Silverstone this year was a “Seb spin”.
A simple conclusion from this part of a glittering career is Vettel makes small but enormously costly mistakes in battle. These are properly tiny micro-decisions that trigger a vital misjudgement but they have occurred too often and in much too similar circumstances to simply be coincidence.
That doesn’t bode well for Vettel in F1’s midfield as it is an environment that will pose these circumstances more often. Especially if his qualifying prowess has been blunted too – in the ultra-competitive battle behind the big teams, a lost tenth or two on Saturday is damaging. If it’s followed up by a big error every fourth or fifth Sunday then it’s catastrophic.
Of course, the hope for Vettel and Aston Martin will be that Ferrari’s constant underperformance, its political in-fighting and its shift in focus to Leclerc has worn Vettel down, and he’s simply in need of reinvigorating.
A fresh start, in a team that wants him badly, with an exciting project that will benefit from his off-track approach as well as what he brings on-track on his good days – these are all valid reasons to think 2021-spec Vettel will be a different prospect to the current version.
Racing Point has had grand ambitions ever since Lawrence Stroll and his consortium revived the team formerly known as Force India, and the Aston era is a part of that.
Podiums and wins have been targeted because Stroll wants to make this one of F1’s strongest entities – so, all being well, Vettel will get back to having a car that puts him out of harm’s way and allows his stronger attributes to shine through.
Patience will be required to get there, though, because chances are in his first year with Aston Martin Vettel will be tasked with spearheading a push for third in the constructors’ championship and having a good chunk of races locked in battle with his former employer Ferrari, McLaren, Renault and maybe AlphaTauri.
In all likelihood, in 2021 and beyond, Vettel will still find himself in a battle that offers no hiding place. So he will need to rediscover his qualifying majesty, and he will need to overcome his deficiency in combat.
While Vettel has spent half his time at Ferrari courting criticism, he spent a decent chunk of the other half winning
Whatever he says to the contrary, that weakness exists. That doesn’t mean it’s permanent – maybe he’s going through an extended version of whatever got under Hamilton’s skin in 2011 – but it is real.
If Aston helps Vettel get on top of that, it will quash a major uncertainty about his prospects in a new environment. That in turn will go a long way to creating the atmosphere Vettel needs to thrive. It could create the sort of positive momentum that Vettel seemed to run out of at Ferrari a while ago.
But if the mistakes continue, it’ll breed more of the same. That would risk defining his Aston spell in the worst way. For while Vettel has spent half his time at Ferrari courting criticism, he spent a decent chunk of the other half winning. That was always a decent amount of goodwill to fall back on. Sure, Vettel will always be a world champion – and no doubt he and his new team will lean on that should there be difficult days – but the longer he goes without fresh success, the more successful he was.
Vettel can make this a success. He’s a hard worker, a fast driver, has bags of experience and an open enough mind to know when things need to improve. And there are things within himself that need to improve.
Starting the Aston F1 era with a world champion on board is considered a huge statement of intent by the team.
Dispel the doubts from his Ferrari decline and Vettel will prove it’s justified.
Fail to do so and he, and Aston, will be left to trade on his past glories.
