“He had lost what should have been a dominant win,” Adrian Newey describes the race that fueled Sebastian Vettel’s Championship dreams
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In July, 2022, four-time World Championship winner Sebastian Vettel shook the entire Formula 1 community to the core as he announced that he will be departing from his role as a regular F1 racer at the end of the season. Now that it is a new year and the fans are all awaiting a new F1 season to start, they have not forgotten the German who was a virtually invincible beast behind the wheels of his Red Bull racecars during the seasons from 2010 to 2013 consecutively. And the man behind Vettel’s Championship-winning cars, RB Chief Technology Officer Adrian Newey, recently reminisced the race that became a turning point for Seb.
Adrian Newey has been associated with Red Bull for a long time, and he has seen Sebastian Vettel build his career in motorsports from nothing. Newey was always there when Seb needed a car that could earn him his World Championships, and the British engineer has also seen how Seb always pushes for perfection. Speaking of the recently retired F1 driver’s endless dedication to his profession, Newey recalled the memory of the 2011 Canadian Grand Prix which proved to give Sebastian Vettel motivation for his second World Championship victory.
In 2011, the then-twenty-four-year-old Sebastian Vettel had walked into a new season with a recent World Championship victory to his name, and he was quite sure he could win the Canadian Grand Prix. But during the last lap of the race, for which he had the pole position, Seb made a mistake and was surpassed by Jenson Button, and the German lost out on a sureshot top position because of that tiny moment. This made Sebastian Vettel quite upset, and he was focused on coming back twice as hard and not making a single error in the season anymore.
Related: Sebastian Vettel to not appear on F1 TV shows: “I’m not going to be a TV pundit.”
Adrian Newey says Sebastian Vettel has always been someone who inspires the team to give their best
After Sebastian Vettel lost out on his top position at the 2011 Canadian Grand Prix in the Gilles Villeneuve Circuit, he was “distraught”, according to Adrian Newey. The Briton described it as, “Jenson beat him. And he was absolutely distraught at that because he felt he had lost what should have been a dominant win. Everybody’s packing up the computers and everything in the engineering office around him while he just sat there going through the data with his engineer, going through the television feeds and stuff. He wanted to understand what he could do better should that situation arise again.“
Adrian Newey also said, “I think that dedication, that played through into the team as well. That meant that then the team often prepared to put in that extra mile because they saw his work and commitment that he was prepared to put in.”
In the coming days, it is not known whether Sebastian Vettel will take up an assignment in any other racing series outside of F1 as he has already announced his retirement from the pinnacle of motorsports. Rumors say that he has gotten plenty of offers from IndyCar and Formula E, but nothing has been confirmed yet.
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Riddhi Mondal
(1821 Articles Published)