Sebastian Vettel

Sebastian VettelWell, it’s official: Sebastian Vettel, Formula 1’s youngest champion, will drive for Ferrari starting with the 2015 racing season. That’s not surprising to race fans, who suspected Vettel was headed for the prancing horse ever since he left Infiniti Red Bull in early October. But the news is finally confirmed, after a weird few days and some shoddy reporting based on a misspelled knockoff Twitter account.

The timeline goes something like this: On October 4, Infiniti Red Bull Racing announced that Vettel would be leaving the team at the close of the 2014 season. Immediately, rumors floated that Vettel was headed for Ferrari. It was already an old rumor at the time—Vettel, the four-time champion, hadn’t nabbed a single win in 2014. Neither had Ferrari. At the announcement of Vettel’s departure, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner mentioned that Ferrari had made the young driver “a very attractive offer.”

But it wasn’t officially official, since Ferrari hadn’t commented. The closest thing we got from Ferrari was a winking hint in the form of this tweet from Wednesday:

That’s where the whole thing went briefly off the rails, spurred by this very convincing-looking tweet issued barely more than an hour later:

Looks like the real deal, but it’s not. Take a closer look at that Twitter handle. This isn’t Scuderia Ferrari, it’s @ScuderiaFerrarL, a misspelled knockoff account established less than an hour before that tweet was posted. The account has tweeted only seven times and amassed a mere 32 followers, but its convincing-enough post welcoming Vettel was enough for at least one news agency, Germany’s DPA, to accept it as truth. Ferrari, the real, correctly spelled Ferrari, responded by telling a different German news source: “We have communicated nothing. These are rumours in the media that we cannot confirm.”



As it turns out, Ferrari just wanted to put out the widely expected news on its own terms. Which it did on the 20th, with a press release touting Vettel’s “unique combination of youthfulness and experience,” Vettel’s friendship with brusquely charming madman Kimi Räikkönen, and their shared aim “to be front runners again as soon as possible.” It’s rumored that Ferrari will pay Vettel $80 million a year during the three-year agreement, making the driver the highest-paid professional athlete in the world.

So, yes: Vettel is joining Scuderia Ferrari. If you’re an F1 fan, you probably expected this. It just required a brief detour in a cloud of Twitter confusion to get here.