The crossroads Vettel faces which could steer his F1 future

Fifteen years have passed since the 2007 Formula 1 season. Given the thrilling fight the championship enjoyed last year, it’s worth reflecting on how many from the past two decades could get close to matching its sustained drama, and the 2007 campaign is certainly in with a shout.

It had the year-long scrap between Ferrari and McLaren, a rookie sensation in the championship fight, a team-mate war, the spy scandal, plus a title showdown in which the outsider took the prize –and who has only just retired. Of the drivers who took part in what became Kimi Raikkonen’s season, three are still on the grid.

Lewis Hamilton is no longer with McLaren, but he’s still fighting at the front with Mercedes all these years from his debut. Fernando Alonso continues to covet a third world title – an unthinkable situation viewed from 2007. And then there’s Sebastian Vettel.

He only joined F1 partway through that season, but he’s since had a career for the ages. Four world titles and domination with Red Bull, living and failing the Ferrari dream, and now representing another legendary motorsport marque, albeit one that 15 years ago was winning the GT1 class at Le Mans, far from the F1 sphere.

Hamilton and Alonso seem determined to race on into F1’s new era, although how Mercedes and Alpine are respectively faring when the early pecking order of the championship’s new formula is revealed will likely determine how long they wish to do so. Vettel’s situation, however, is more enigmatic – and all the more interesting because of it.

Sebastian Vettel is gearing up for his second season with Aston Martin

Photo by: Motorsport Images

This time last year, Vettel was preparing to make his race bow with a new team for the first time in six seasons. And Aston was grappling with being hit hardest, along with Mercedes, by the rear-floor rule tweaks mandated along with the carryover car requirements from 2020.

Vettel’s Aston race results began badly when he clattered into Esteban Ocon during the 2021 Bahrain season opener and, next time out at Imola, pre-race brake overheating problems unleashed many subsequent issues. But his form soon improved.

Monaco was his standout drive. Even though he finished ‘just’ fifth, he outperformed the title-contending Hamilton. Then in Baku he charged to the podium – Aston’s first in F1 – in the chaos that followed Max Verstappen’s tyre blowout. In Hungary, he closely pursued Ocon throughout the Frenchman’s famous maiden win, but lost his second place when his car could not produce a fuel sample.

"Sebastian is a clever guy, he will not be focusing just on this year’s car, but focusing more on what is happening, and if he sees the potential" Mike Krack

Those were the highlights, but perhaps the bigger takeaway was that Vettel appeared to have left behind what had seemed to become – at times – an onerous F1 existence at Ferrari. The Ocon clash in Bahrain proved to one of the few driving errors Vettel made in 2021. He did have solo spins at Silverstone and Zandvoort, but generally the troubles that had littered his later seasons in red seemed not to have followed him through to life in green. He appeared rejuvenated out of the cockpit too.

He is now starting a pretty crucial year. As the 2022 campaign gets under way, Vettel is committed to Aston only to the end of the season. As with Hamilton, but more pertinently with Alonso because the Spaniard is in a similar contract-ending situation, Vettel’s early experiences in F1’s new era are set to be key when it comes to considering how his illustrious career might end. For a start, he’s spent winter testing at Barcelona and in Bahrain learning “a car that wants to be driven in a different way”, adapting to the ground-effect formula. “It’s a completely different animal and it wants to be tamed in a different way,” he said in Spain. “That’s driving the car, but that’s also operating, in terms of set-up. I’m playing with driving styles, what I can do.”

Vettel starred during the last major F1 rules overhaul during his time at Red Bull

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Most of Vettel’s F1 success came during the Pirelli era of fragile tyres and building critical skills to keep the rubber alive. But what really set him apart during his years as the championship’s undisputed star was how he adapted to get the best from the exhaust blown-diffuser cars Red Bull produced at the start of the last decade. So, the 34-year-old can handily recall successfully rising to a complex driving challenge – those cars needed drivers to apply power counterintuitively to be fast, hitting the gas to produce extra downforce when encountering oversteer, for example – as he works his way into the subtleties of the ground-effect machines. The danger with these new cars is that they are likely to bite their drivers suddenly if the airflow to the venturi tunnels unexpectedly unseals, which could result in regular random spins for the unwary. It would be unfortunate for Vettel if the ‘Seb Spin’ were to re-enter the F1 lexicon…

But how the upcoming campaign unfolds for Vettel will, of course, not only be down to his on-track performances. Since the Aston name was brought back to F1 for the first time in 61 years, Lawrence Stroll’s team has eclipsed the results of the original David Brown-owned squad that entered five world championship races in 1959 and 1960. That is except in terms of highest grid spot, with Vettel’s fifth place qualifying at Spa last year still three places short of Roy Salvadori’s front-row start for the 1959 British Grand Prix. But seventh in the constructors’ championship is a long way from the title ambition Stroll has for Aston.

The team stopped developing its 2021 charger after just a quarter of last season had passed, as it devoted its resources towards the new rules. And because of the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic so utterly disrupted normal development cycles and processes for F1 teams in 2020, the former Racing Point squad is still yet to show what it can really do with the added investment Stroll now provides compared to the cash-strapped final Force India days.

Vettel said at the AMR22’s launch that 2022 would therefore be “a true test” for Aston, where “we will see how good we are”. And the team itself is aware that the question of Vettel’s future is correspondingly more complicated as a result. It must also convince him to stay on.

“It’s clear that a guy like Sebastian, a four-time world champion, he does not want to be 15th or 12th or P8,” said new Aston team principal Mike Krack, who was Vettel’s engineer when he sampled BMW Sauber’s car at the 2006 Turkish GP, his first F1 weekend appearance. “It is our task to deliver a performing car. Or let’s say performing structure, because I think Sebastian is a clever guy, he will not be focusing just on this year’s car or whatever, but focusing more on what is happening, and if he sees the potential. So, if we can manage to offer this to him, I think we have a chance to keep him for longer.”

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New Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack has reunited with Vettel having been his engineer during his F1 debut at BMW Sauber

Photo by: FIA Pool

But will Vettel want to stay even if Aston makes major progress on its ambitions? Winning makes sport feel so much better, but in one way Vettel already seems to be even greater than he was when scoring all those titles. And that’s to do with how he approaches life outside the paddock.

Vettel famously spent the hours after the 2021 British GP picking up litter in the grandstands opposite the pits. He’s also completed a farming internship and, before last year’s Austrian GP, he built a habitat for bees with schoolchildren local to the Red Bull Ring. He regularly cycles into races from his accommodation, and is known to make big journeys to races by train if flying can be avoided. But it’s not just concerns for the environment where Vettel is showing committed leadership qualities.

Vettel is one of the most outspoken drivers on many of the topics that modern sport – and F1 in particular – must often address. Only Hamilton is on a similar level, and there was a feeling in the room at the Barcelona test, when Vettel told the press he “should not go, I will not go” to Russia following that country’s invasion of Ukraine, that his frankness helped others – including Verstappen – to offer similar sentiment.

In a year when his F1 future will be much discussed, it’s time to wonder how Vettel the individual squares his off-track views with being an F1 driver

Indeed, after it was announced that F1’s ‘We Race as One’ pre-race ceremony was to be scrapped, Vettel suggested “it was getting a bit too strong and too individual for the business side of things”. This was coming from a driver who wore a rainbow T-shirt during the ceremony in Hungary last year in support of the LGBTQ+ community.

And so, in a year when his F1 future will be much discussed, it’s time to wonder how Vettel the individual squares his off-track views with being an F1 driver. That’s the lifestyle it requires and the compromises that are regularly made in a division where the pursuit of money generally trumps principles. The simple counterpoint is that, by being a high-profile F1 star, Vettel can use his platform to raise awareness for the causes he cares about. But you sense that Vettel isn’t doing what he does for that reason – he’s doing it because that’s who he is. Vettel is secure in himself, his position and reputation, unafraid to be a voice to be counted on at the top of modern sport. If 2022 is to be his last season, then F1 should step back and enjoy it while it lasts.

Could Vettel end up stepping away from F1 at the end of 2022?

Photo by: Alessio Morgese