Formula One: has Vettel reached the end of the road?
“It wasn’t meant to end this way,” said Andrew Benson on BBC Sport. When Sebastian Vettel joined Ferrari in 2014, his dream was to “win the world championship with the Italian team”, adding to the four world titles he’d already claimed at Red Bull. Instead, the German’s time at Maranello will end in frustration: he’s set to leave the team at the end of the season. The rupture “completes an extraordinary deterioration” in his relationship with Ferrari, said Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. Vettel was apparently offered a chance to stay, but only for an additional 12 months, and with a “huge reduction” to his £36m salary. In the absence of viable suitors, the decision to walk away leaves him with few options. Now, at just 32, he faces “a bleak exit from the sport he cherishes”.
If Vettel does decide to retire, he will bow out as one of the most successful drivers in F1 history, said Luke Slater in the same paper. His four world championships put him behind only Michael Schumacher, Lewis Hamilton and Juan Manuel Fangio. But “the peak of his performance was relatively fleeting”: the last of those titles came in 2013, when he was just 26. And at Ferrari, Vettel simply “failed to deliver”, said Giles Richards in The Guardian. He started promisingly, but it wasn’t long before the wheels came off. In both 2017 and 2018, he led the championship for much of the season, only to be let down by a series of calamitous mistakes. And last season, he was shown up by his 22-year-old teammate, Charles Leclerc, and ended a disappointing fifth. It wasn’t all Vettel’s fault, said Andrew Benson. He was often let down by Ferrari. His stint in Italy confirms he lacks Hamilton or Schumacher’s “ability to extract the best from any car”, but on his day, in the right circumstances, he’s still “up there with the very best”.