He is forged in the image of Dr Helmut Marko, his arch-defender and the team’s
director of motorsport, who spent his formative years tearing along icy
Austrian country lanes with Jochen Rindt on the understanding that if they
crashed, they were on their own.
Obscured by Vettel’s
latest imbroglio with Webber is his record as a brilliant, uncompromising
racer, whose 27 wins and 38 pole positions continue to expose the fallacious
logic that he has achieved three world titles solely because he boasts a car
designed by the peerless Adrian Newey.
Let us not forget that his maiden triumph arrived as long ago as Monza in 2008
– in a Toro Rosso. If his distinctions were mechanically enhanced, then why
has Webber won only nine grands prix with the same machinery? The explicit
hierarchy at Red Bull is in place for a reason.
And it is this accepted order that Vettel so mercilessly exploited last
Sunday, subjugating the authority of team principal Christian Horner and
emasculating even a proud Antipodean male like Webber without the slightest
remorse.
He was there to win his 25 championship points, to pounce upon the first-lap
retirement of chief rival Fernando Alonso, to assert his status as Red
Bull’s de facto leader. Webber’s molten stare afterwards also betrayed a
frayed self-esteem, the pain of which he is only now trying to palliate with
a fortnight’s surfing in Australia.
How disparate are the standards we apply to the greatest drivers. Ayrton Senna
once defended his audacity by claiming: “We are competing to win, and if you
no longer go for a gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver.”
Then, the world of F1 genuflected. Now, the same people label Vettel as
brattish because he displays the same characteristics in the cockpit.
It is perhaps the legacy of the Schumacher era that Vettel is unfairly painted
as just another Teutonic automaton.
The fact that he has a reputation for being remote, sheltering from the lenses
with girlfriend Hanna Prater in the Swiss village of Walchwil, and that he
represents a team created from a sickly sweet energy drink all adds to a
misplaced suspicion of soullessness.
But viewed another way, his antics in Malaysia could underline the emergence
of the finest driver we have been privileged to witness.
Win a fourth title, and Vettel would elevate himself to the company of Alain
Prost. Only the great Argentine Juan Manuel Fangio and Schumacher would
remain ahead and he would still, scarcely credibly, be 26.
Thus, his little piece of chicanery at Webber’s expense spoke of a young man
impatient to cut further swathes through the records of his sport.
Frank Scheider, columnist for Bild in Germany, calls it the “dirtbag”
philosophy.
“Vettel’s killer instinct won’t make him more popular with his Formula One
colleagues,” he writes. “But it is also what sets him apart from
middle-of-the-road drivers. Schumacher was either loved or hated. Vettel is
on his way to being the same.”
The passage of time, and the tempering of Webber’s immediate grievance, should
highlight the irrationality of such hatred. Vettel is simply astoundingly
talented, and possessed of that touch of the devil where true greatness
lies.