As the season ticks down, Sebastian Vettel needs to win the next race in Mexico and hope that Lewis Hamilton finishes P8 or lower to have any hope of prolonging Hamilton’s fifth career World Drivers’ Championship title. With that in mind, it’s virtually guaranteed that Hamilton will secure the title in Mexico and the title has slipped through Ferrari’s hands once again. Ferrari has no one to blame but Vettel.
WARNING: I’m going to criticize Sebastian Vettel in this article and point out mistakes that he has made. I understand that there are a lot of people that like Vettel. If you are a Vettel fan and do not feel that you can maturely handle your favourite driver being criticized, I advise you to click here to load up another article at random.
Now that that’s out of the way, I think it’s obvious that Ferrari has an issue finishing the season. This is the second season in a row that we have watched Ferrari pose an early threat to Mercedes for the World Drivers’ Championship title, only to fall apart in the latter stages of the season and hand a comfortable victory to the Silver Arrows.
Let’s get one thing straight. As much as I like Mercedes and as much as I respect Lewis Hamilton, I want to see Ferrari take title just as much as anyone right now. Bravo to Mercedes for their complete domination at the top of the leaderboard for the past four seasons, but it’s not healthy for the sport and it’s ultimately not what the fans want to see when they sit down to watch a race.
While some people think that the issue with Ferrari has to do with the team management or the car development, it seems painfully clear that the issue has to do with the driver who has been labelled as the team’s number one: Sebastian Vettel.
Don’t get me wrong, Vettel is undeniably a good driver. While winning championships can largely depend on how good or bad your car is, winning four championship titles in a row does take some level of skill and driving ability. There are some people who will probably think that I’m lashing out at Vettel for his collision in the United States, but the issue stems far deeper than that.
Vettel has a history of making unwise decisions that ultimately cost him the chance to challenge for the championship title. For example, let’s look at 2017. The team started out strong, challenging Mercedes for race victories, but after the summer break things fell apart. In the end, it was his first corner crash in Singapore that cost him his chances of winning the championship.
Winning a championship requires pure race performance, but it also requires some consistency. When you are racing for the championship title, you can’t afford to retire from a race because of a crash and lose those valuable points. Gone are the days of Formula One in which it was common for reliability issues to strike down your competition, so the chances to recovering your season after a mistake are quite low. The easiest thing to do is to no make those mistakes in the beginning, which is something that Vettel has yet to master.
In 2018, Ferrari started the season strong with two wins, but luck was not on their side in China when Verstappen collided with Vettel, ruining his race. However, Vettel has no one else to blame for the rest of the mistakes that he has made this season.
He locked up when trying to take the lead of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, losing his P2 finish and 6 possible points. In France, he drove to deep into the corner on the first lap of the race, colliding with Bottas and destroying his front wing, losing what could have been a P3 finish at least and an extra 5 points. In Germany, he lost the car on the damp track, throwing away his race victory and losing the associated 25 points. In Italy, he was involved in an opening lap crash with Hamilton, losing what could have been at least a P2 finish and an additional 8 points. Then in Japan, he runs into Verstappen when attempting to make an overtake into a high-speed corner, throwing away what (conservatively) could have been at the very least a P5 finish worth another 2 extra points.
That’s at least 46 points that Vettel’s mistakes have amounted to, which could put him in contention for the championship title still. There have been some strange Ferrari tyre strategy calls throughout the season as well, which contributed to some additional lost points, but the 46 points is purely a conservative estimate of just the points lost from Vettel’s mistakes. And that’s not even including his most recent mistake in the United States, when he crashed into Daniel Ricciardo on the first lap of the race.
Vettel really has no excuse for the mistakes that he’s making. His teammate isn’t challenging him, instead opting to play a wingman position as we saw at the Chinese Grand Prix when the team left him out on old tyres to slow Bottas and allow Vettel to get close.
While I don’t necessarily agree with the promotion of Charles Leclerc at this stage in his career, it’s clearly a threat to Vettel. It’s the team’s way of saying telling him that if he doesn’t stop making rookie mistakes, they now have a younger more talented driver to take his place as the number one driver.
Vettel is on his final legs with Ferrari. A top tier team like Ferrari has no room for a driver that’s incapable of winning them the championship titles and they aren’t going to continue to support a driver like that. Vettel needs to get out of his head and just race for consistent results in 2019.
The saddest part about this whole situation is that it’s the team that is suffering. The team is getting the flack for the poor results. There are even rumors floating around that team principal Maurizio Arrivabene may be “leaving” the team in the near future, although we know from Marco Mattiacci and Stefano Domenicali that one does not “leave” Ferrari… they are sacked. This would be a great tragedy, since Arrivabene has done some great work getting the team closer to challenging Mercedes.
All he needs now is a driver that can get to the top. Is that Vettel? It could be, but not with his sloppy mistakes. In his current form, Vettel will never win his fifth career championship and he will not remain with Ferrari. He needs to smarten up or he will find himself hunting for a contract with a different team.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer or company. Assumptions made in any analysis contained within this article are not reflective of the position of any entity other than the author.
