Champion is still poles apart
Sebastian Vettel is chasing history this year. His rivals hope that they are not chasing him.
SEBASTIAN Vettel is the driver who has everything except somewhere to put his world championship trophy. It sits on his kitchen table, jostling for position with the salt cellar and the cornflakes while he redesigns his house to accommodate a bigger trophy cabinet than he had budgeted for.
At 24, he is amassing a haul that could surpass that of Michael Schumacher, the most successful driver in Formula One with seven world titles and 91 race victories. Once it would have seemed preposterous that any driver in the modern age could repeat Schumacher’s extraordinary feat but Vettel has been going so fast in a little more than four years in F1 that he has surprised even himself.
When he drew up plans for a new home in a pretty village just over the German border in Switzerland, he left a space for a trophy cabinet. That is redundant now, with a pile of 36 trophies on the living room carpet and two world championship cups yet to find a place on the shelf, including the 2011 world title trophy he collected in November.
‘‘It is on the kitchen table at the moment,’’ he said, with his usual cheeky grin. ‘‘Not with the cornflakes. I am German, so it has to be precise. You can’t mix the cornflakes with the world championship trophy.’’
It is ominous news for the rest of F1 but the youngest champion in history was in fine form on Wednesday night as he happily pretended to join in a cricket lesson on Melbourne’s St Kilda Beach for the benefit of the world’s cameras.
He laughed and joked about the new name for his car – Kinky Kylie of last year has been followed by Abbey, named for his love of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album – and looked like a man prepared to do what he did last season all over again.