Where Vettel stands in the list of the greatest F1 drivers

Sebastian Vettel his retired from Formula 1 with 53 victories and 57 pole positions from his 299 world championship grand prix starts, and four titles to his name.

Those statistics automatically put him into an elite group of great drivers – it’s impossible to luck your way into that level of success – but where exactly does he sit in the pantheon of F1 legends?

Now that the German’s illustrious F1 career is has come to a close – unless Lewis Hamilton is right about Vettel one day returning! – it seems the right time to look at his decade and a half at the pinnacle of the sport, his impact, and strengths and weaknesses.

Vettel will be remembered as one of the F1 greats, but where does he stack up?

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

The basic stats

Vettel’s 53 victories put him third on the all-time wins list, behind just Hamilton and Michael Schumacher, while his 57 poles place him a clear fourth, with Hamilton, Schumacher and Ayrton Senna on more. Vettel’s tally of four world titles has only been surpassed by Schumacher, Hamilton (both on seven) and Juan Manuel Fangio (five), putting him alongside Alain Prost.

Of course, careers (and seasons) are longer now – Fangio only started 51 world championship events – so strike rate provides a better way of comparing drivers across different eras.

Excluding the Indianapolis 500, which counted for points from 1950-60, only 15 drivers have so far achieved a wins strike rate of 15% or better in the world championship. Vettel is one of those, but he is further down the list than on the wins tally:

Even the strike rate doesn’t tell the full story. It can’t take into account time spent in uncompetitive cars or the strength of the eras in which the drivers were competing, so other factors need to be considered.

As Autosport has previously revealed, F1 was at its most competitive during parts of the Cosworth DFV era in the 1970s and during the 2000s prior to the turbo-hybrid regulations, particularly during the engine freeze from 2007. This strengthens the cases for Jackie Stewart and both Hamilton and Vettel.

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Conversely, the gaps (both between cars and drivers) were much bigger in the 1950s, weakening the arguments for Fangio and Alberto Ascari. That’s not to say they should not be in the debate – you can only beat who is there – but it is worth considering when looking at their incredible strike rates.

Alonso and Hamilton stand out as Vettel's biggest rivals and talents in his generation

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Era benchmarks

When Autosport considered the question of the greatest driver of all time for our 70th anniversary celebrations, we looked at the era-defining drivers. These are the performers who, through statistics and the opinions of their peers and key figures, set the standard.

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Since the start of the world championship in 1950, those drivers are Fangio, Stirling Moss, Jim Clark, Stewart, Niki Lauda, Prost, Senna, Schumacher and Hamilton. Max Verstappen seems the most likely candidate to join this list over the next few years.

This seems a sensible starting point when discussing the greatest of all time, with the caveat that some other drivers – most notably Ascari, Gilles Villeneuve and Fernando Alonso – also need to be considered for their places in the hierarchy during their careers.

Vettel didn’t quite match Hamilton and Alonso across his period in F1, though you could make a case for him being the third-strongest driver of his generation. It makes sense to select these three because, until the rise of Verstappen, they had won all but three of the titles since the end of the Schumacher era – Kimi Raikkonen, Jenson Button and Nico Rosberg being the interlopers. Vettel has to be placed above them, even if any one of those three could beat him on their day.

Although a little too inexperienced in 2009 and facing too much of a task to catch early pacesetter Button, Vettel nailed his Red Bull opportunities thereafter, taking four consecutive titles. His domination over team-mate Mark Webber extended over time as Red Bull rallied around him, to the point where Vettel won 13 races to Webber’s zero in 2013, and he adapted well to the counter-intuitive driving style required to get the best out of the blown diffuser concept.

Podcast: Top 10 Red Bull F1 drivers ranked

On the negative side, Vettel was more often troubled by his team-mates than Hamilton or Alonso. After his title run, he struggled alongside Daniel Ricciardo during 2014 in the first year of the hybrid era. Vettel then comfortably outperformed Raikkonen when they were both at Ferrari (though perhaps not as extensively as Alonso did there in 2014) before Charles Leclerc wrestled the pre-eminent position away in 2019-20.

The team-mate defeats suffered by Hamilton (to Button in 2011, Rosberg in 2016 and George Russell in 2022) and Alonso (to Button in 2015 and Esteban Ocon this season) are not as heavy as those of Vettel in 2014 and 2020.

Autosport’s top 10 drivers lists are an attempt to create an objective rating each year, given the limitations of each racer’s machinery. Looking at 2008-21 (look out for the 2022 list soon!), the time that Vettel contested full seasons in F1, gives us another way of viewing the era:

It should be noted that Alonso wasn’t in F1 in 2019-20 and that both he (2005 and 2006) and Hamilton (2007) topped the list prior to Vettel’s arrival, underlining their claims as the leading post-Schumacher drivers. Robert Kubica (2008) and Ricciardo (2014 and 2016) are the only other drivers to have topped the list in this period, with Verstappen a growing force in recent years as he leads the next generation.

Hamilton was clearly the top performer across the period. Alonso was also much more consistent than Vettel, with eight top-three appearances from his 12 years compared to Vettel’s five from 14, even though Sebastian topped the list one extra time. Across their whole careers, Hamilton has topped the list nine times, Alonso three and Vettel two.

While Vettel did set F1 records, he was also prone to mistakes, such as his Hockenheim 2018 lapse

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Strengths and weaknesses

All of the biggest F1 names have great drives on their CV and Vettel is no exception. He might not have as many swashbuckling drives against the odds as Alonso or examples of turning a race around as Hamilton, but Vettel’s 2008 Italian GP win for Toro Rosso stands as one of the great wet-weather drives and he was capable of crushing domination, such as his 2013 Indian GP success.

Top 10: Vettel’s F1 wins ranked

Vettel even has one over Hamilton in that he won for three different teams as opposed to the Briton’s two. While forging a long-term relationship and galvanising a team has increasingly become the norm for F1 frontrunners, showing an ability to work with new people and machinery, and continuing to win, surely counts in Vettel’s favour.

A weakness in wheel-to-wheel combat was sometimes an unfair criticism levelled at Vettel during his Red Bull pomp. He has shown on numerous occasions, perhaps most memorably in his charge from 24th to third in the 2012 Abu Dhabi GP, that he’s capable of battling through the pack. He should also be regarded as part of the generation – along with Alonso, Button, Hamilton and Raikkonen – that improved the quality of on-track combat after some dubious moves by some of their predecessors.

Nevertheless, when Vettel went wheel-to-wheel with Hamilton in their 2017 and 2018 title fights it was the Mercedes driver who usually came off best and Vettel spent too much of the latter campaign facing the wrong way after spins in battle.

Vettel also made an error of judgement at the start of the 2017 Singapore GP, triggering a multi-car crash, and showed a weakness by going off while leading the 2018 German GP on a day he began leading the championship and 13 places ahead of Hamilton on the grid.

There were some red-mist moments too, where his usually sound judgement went out the window. Both his 2010 Turkish GP clash with team-mate Webber and contact with Hamilton behind the safety car in the 2017 Azerbaijan GP were unnecessary – and costly.

In more recent times, he proved capable of bouncing back from his troubled final period at Ferrari with some fine drives at Aston Martin. And he has kept his cool in the face of significant provocation, such as team-mate Lance Stroll’s move in the Interlagos sprint race.

Vettel has been a leading voice on environmental issues in the final few years of his F1 career

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Finding his place

Very few drivers can claim to have moved the game on. Moss and Stewart score for increasing the level of professionalism, Lauda, Prost and Senna brought incredible work ethics and analysis, something Schumacher continued as well as raising the fitness bar.

Vettel doesn’t have an equivalent, though being the first driver to win races and titles for Red Bull gives him a special place in F1 history. Like Hamilton, his increasing maturity and confidence to stand up for what he believes towards the end of his career could also mean he has an impact on wider subjects than motorsport.

On-track, Vettel was not quite the defining driver of his era. That immediately puts him in the very fine batch of great drivers behind the Big Nine listed above. Verstappen is on a trajectory that will surely place him ahead too.

Alonso also has to be regarded higher on the all-time list, placing Vettel third within his generation. That means battling the likes of Jack Brabham, Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell among the tier of second- and third-best performers of their eras – no shame there.

Comparing across time is always tricky and highly controversial no matter how objective the attempt. In some ways, comparing the drivers in second and third of their periods requires even more nuance than the top drivers, requiring an assessment of the gaps between them and the benchmarks as well as a look at the overall competitiveness of the era. The former probably hurts Vettel in this debate, while the latter lifts him.

Given all of the above, Vettel probably sits in the top 20-30 F1 drivers of all time.

This should in no way be seen as a back-handed compliment. Nearly 800 drivers have started a world championship event, 113 have won and only 34 have taken the world championship. That’s not even accounting for the scores of drivers who tried to make it but failed.

Vettel is a pleasingly knowledgeable fan of the sport – how many other F1 drivers would rock up with their own car from an era before they were racing, as Vettel did at Silverstone with a Williams FW14B? His own place in F1 history is assured and, once he has taken some time to reflect following Abu Dhabi, we’d love to know where he thinks he should be on the list of greatest drivers…

Where would you rank Vettel in the list of greatest F1 drivers?

Photo by: Sutton Images