‘Baby Schumi’ comes of age with third F1 world title
Sebastian Vettel – age 16, celebrates his victory with his mother after winning a Formula BMW race in 2003
Nov.26 (Reuters) They called him ‘Baby Schumi’ when he first came onto the Formula One scene but Sebastian Vettel has blown away even Michael Schumacher with his third successive title at the age of just 25 and having needed just 101 grand prix races to achieve the feat. The youngest triple champion the sport has ever seen, the Red Bull driver is only the third – after the late Argentine Juan Manuel Fangio and Schumacher himself – to win three championships in a row.
The younger German is the only man, however, to take his first three titles in consecutive years.
Vettel’s latest moment of triumph came on Sunday at a Brazilian Grand Prix that saw Schumacher finally depart the stage at the age of 43 and after a record seven titles and 91 wins in a career spanning more than two decades.
Schumacher started out racing the likes of Nigel Mansell, Nelson Piquet and Alain Prost and he leaves with the sport dominated by a man who was four years old at the time of his own 1991 debut.
It took Schumacher 143 races to become a triple champion – at the age of 31.
Vettel, less baby-faced than he was but still cheerfully cheeky, has always been a man in a hurry from the day he came into Formula One in 2007 and immediately became the youngest driver to score a point. He became the youngest grand prix pole sitter, race winner and driver on the podium with Toro Rosso in 2008, the youngest champion in 2010 and, unlike Schumacher, has a strong sense of Formula One history.
When Schumacher retired for the first time in 2006, the sages opined that his records were unlikely to be matched in the foreseeable future.
They did not foresee the arrival of Vettel, who before Brazil had won 26 percent of the races he had started and been on pole position in 36 percent of them. He had also finished on the podium 46 times in 100 starts.
Whereas Schumacher left Benetton for Ferrari after his 1994 and 1995 championships and spent years helping the Italian team to their first drivers’ title in 21 years, Vettel has so far resisted a move.
There is every chance, with a team that has won the constructors’ title for the past three years and has the brilliance of designer Adrian Newey keeping them a step ahead of the rest, that the younger German can bite deeper and deeper into Schumacher’s records. Once dubbed a ‘Crash Kid’ by McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh, Vettel showed a new maturity last year when he ran away with his second title.
He has been less dominant this season, at least in the first half, but has been rewarded for his consistency in an unpredictable championship.
“I think from the first year when he won in 2010, you’d say his consistency is quite a bit better from that year,” said McLaren’s Jenson Button, 2009 champion with Brawn GP, who was on the end of a jarring collision with Vettel in Belgium in 2010 that triggered Whitmarsh’s comment.
“He was making quite a few mistakes, I felt. I think he’s grown in confidence over the last two years and you can see that in the consistency that he’s had. Obviously he’s been in a great car over that time as well, but the consistency has been there.”
In 2010, Vettel did not lead the championship until the moment when it really mattered, after the final floodlit race in Abu Dhabi when he clawed back a 15-point deficit on Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso. The following year, he wrapped up the title in Japan with four races to spare. He ended that same season with a record 15 pole positions and 11 race wins.
The German has found it harder to assert himself this season with seven different winners in the first seven races but Singapore in September proved the turning point, and he went on to win four races in a row to take the lead from Alonso in South Korea.
“It’s all too easy to say he’s had the fastest car because on numerous occasions this year he hasn’t,” said team principal Christian Horner.
“He came back from the summer break almost 40 points behind the championship lead. He focused hard, he worked hard at it and he maximised his chances. I think he’s driven superbly well this year,” added the Briton.
A carpenter’s son from Heppenheim, Vettel has given all his cars female names, progressing from ‘Kate’ to ‘Kate’s Dirty Sister’, ‘Luscious Liz’, ‘Randy Mandy’ and last year’s ‘Kinky Kylie’. This year’s model was simply ‘Abbey’, a name Vettel insisted was not linked to his love of The Beatles album ‘Abbey Road’. Abbey is also a familiar corner at Silverstone, the circuit nearest to Red Bull’s Milton Keynes factory.
He is very much his own man, negotiating his own contracts, while enjoying a firm friendship with Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone, with whom he sometimes plays a relaxed game of backgammon.
Ecclestone, who managed and was particularly close to German-born Austrian champion Jochen Rindt up to his death in 1970, has seen parallels between the two.
“He reminds me of Jochen,” the 82-year-old said last year. “Seb will always stay grounded, no matter how big the success. That is what makes real champions. That was also Jochen’s strength. Plus…both are lousy losers.”
A marketing dream for Red Bull, with obvious youth appeal and a love of action sports, Vettel was born in 1987 – the same year that they sold their first can of energy drink – and started out with their young driver programme. He made his debut with BMW-Sauber in 2007, scoring immediately, but swiftly moved back into the Red Bull fold.
Vettel has been partnered by Australian Mark Webber in all three of his championship years and the two get along well enough despite occasional moments of friction in 2010.
The single digit raised in celebration after every race win, accompanied by whoops of delight from the cockpit, has become a trademark gesture – and just as irksome for rivals as Schumacher’s podium jump for joy in the early years of the century.
Schumacher was a boyhood hero and the two have forged a strong relationship away from F1 the track, combining as a winning German partnership in the annual Race of Champions event.
The pair embraced after Sunday’s race and Schumacher had earlier let his compatriot go through to take sixth place in the closing laps.
“When I met him the first time, obviously I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t want to ask something stupid,” Vettel recalled last week. “[It's a] very special the relationship we share and I think he will always be an inspiration for myself.
“He reminds me of Jochen,” the 82-year-old said last year. “Seb will always stay grounded, no matter how big the success. That is what makes real champions. That was also Jochen’s strength. Plus…both are lousy losers.”
Alonso更是品质保证,虽然偶尔massa会快过他而且日本站那场alonso也有点误判兼乐观,其他站alonso的表现根本就是一级表现,反而是ferrari只比mclaren好看一点点,又逼让位车还是一样慢。所以我还是觉得vettel还不是那个级别的车手,不过多年后没人会记得他怎样得冠,只会有人知道vettel= triple world champion or more!
Fernando Alonso has spent a season gaining our admiration for some of the most remorseless driving yet seen in an F1 championship. While his team-mate was floundering with the troublesome F2012, "Tenacious-F" (As Andrew Davies has dubbed him) grabbed the car by the scruff of its neck and scored points.
He could never qualify it that high up the grid but come race day a combination of supreme racecraft, some blinding starts coupled with dogged determination resulted in a championship lead that many in the pitlane couldn't quite believe, given that the benchmark car was battling it out with the mid-grid. Now, with the post-race farce of Ferrari asking the FIA to review the footage from the race in order to overturn the result, the Scuderia, pushed by Alonso, have gone too far.
Alonso seemed to have matured as a driver. This version seemed nothing like the paranoid individual who yelled at his own Renault team and accused them of not wanting him to win the title in 2006 because they knew he was off to McLaren in 2007.
The incident happened after the 2006 Chinese GP where Michael Schumacher took control of the Drivers' title race after some botched Renault tyre stops handed him a win and almost promoted Fisichella above Alonso. Alonso accused his team of only wanting to win the Constructors' title and that there were those in the team who didn't want to see him waltz off with the No.1 to McLaren in 2007.
In the end he calmed down and after Michael Schumacher's failure in Japan he became World Champion again.
The following season and Alonso thought he'd be walking into a McLaren team where he was a definite No.1 and Lewis Hamilton was No.2 - and expected to be favored. When McLaren turned round and told him that they gave their drivers equal equipment and equal treatment he was not impressed.
This was at the time when McLaren were up to no good and using illegally obtained Ferrari designs via Mike Coughlan (McLaren) and Nigel Stepney (Ferrari). So when Lewis Hamilton annoyed Alonso in qualifying for the Hungarian GP and Alonso retaliated by leaving his car in the pitbox so that Lewis couldn't get a final qualifying run in and beat his pole time, the relationship between Alonso and team boss Ron Dennis achieved meltdown.
The FIA intervened (quite unfairly because it was an intra-team argument) and pushed Alonso back to sixth on the grid. The points he lost that day ultimately lost him the World Championship. On the morning of the Hungarian race Alonso allegedly threatened to go to the FIA with evidence of Spygate unless he got his own way, so Dennis then phoned FIA President Max Mosley himself.
At the subsequent FIA inquiry in Paris, Dennis revealed that Alonso had deliberately not attended the Paris hearing, even though the Spaniard had been asked to by the team.
Fast forward to this season and the moment Sebastian Vettel overtakes Alonso in the Drivers' title race, the Ferrari press team give a briefing to the BBC that Vettel has reached an agreement to drive for them from 2014. Vettel denies it fiercely and has to issue strenuous denials to his team and his fans.
After the race in Brazil last Sunday Vettel revealed that he was proud to have won the title without resorting to 'dirty tricks' which was a reference to that particular piece of gamesmanship. Judging how mentally unhinged Alonso sounded after the Chinese GP in 2006, when Schumacher took over the lead of the championship, you even have to wonder if Alonso encouraged the release of that piece of dis-information.
The clutching at straws represented by Ferrari (backed by Alonso who tweeted about enforcing the rules) studying Vettel's whole race to see if he made a mistake that could gain him a penalty is a sad reflection on the psyche of someone who we admire for not giving up, but who needs to know when to give up. There is a thin line between absolute determination and raving obsession and in pursuing the title victory after it's been well and truly lost, Fernando's showing us an unhealthy aspect of his personality that doesn't seem to have matured as well as the public image.
In 2007 there was a big controversy after the Brazil race that Kimi Raikkonen won (Massa handed him the win) because many of the teams were using illegally cooled fuel. This wasn't spotted by McLaren but actually brought to the attention of the FIA by technical delegate Jo Bauer. Cars that had finished in front of Lewis Hamilton could very well have been disqualified making him World Champion not Raikkonen.
After the 2007 race Fernando went on Spanish radio and said that it was stupid that McLaren were trying to pursue a challenge to the race result and that if they changed the World Champion now it would be a "joke". (Autosport mischievously dug up the story yesterday, but sadly it's gone now) And in this case McLaren were going on information supplied by an FIA official, not on claims brought up by evidence they'd dug up.
We had an epic 2012 racing season, with an amazing finale and a miraculous finish for Vettel. Alonso along with Stefano Domenicali had won plaudits for their unceasing struggle against faster cars and a wind tunnel that wasn't calibrated properly. They took the prize for being gallant losers. Not any more. Strike the word gallant.
发表于 26-11-2012 04:59 PM
发表于 26-11-2012 06:48 PM
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