UNSTOPPABLE GOES ON BOOS VETTEL CRUISE
LEWIS HAMILTON could at least make a joke about his plight. He said winning the championship would
be ‘ like climbing Mount Everest, doing it without oxygen and running up it in swimming trunks’.
Alas, the most famous Formula One fans in the world, the tifosi, did not acknowledge Sebastian Vettel’s dominance with so much style when they took to the pit straight at the close of the Italian Grand Prix.
Flags were waved, tickertape filled the air and cheers soared in this traditional pilgrimage at Monza, Italian motor racing’s madrigal in tarmac. But yesterday the booing for the victorious Vettel carried an intensity rare even for t hese parts, where t hey are routinely as oneeyed as Cyclops.
Red is their colour, Ferrari is their creed, so when another German, Michael Schumacher, was
“Di Resta’s race was over before it had really begun”
strangling the life out of the sport by dint of his monotonous success, he was worshipped as a god.
But Vettel’s feats — winner of three consecutive world titles and holder of a 53point lead over his nearest challenger, Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, the runnerup — are deemed worthy of earsplitting condemnation. His Red Bull overalls carry no allure.
The decibel levels barely fell when John Surtees, world champion for Ferrari in 1964 and conducting the podium interviews, urged the fans to calm down.
Now Vettel has been booed at Silverstone and in Montreal and Monza. He is considered ripe for vilification, which one suspects hurts him rather more than he dared to admit yesterday.
His serial victories are part of it, but so too is his unsporting behaviour in ignoring instructions not to push against his teammate Mark Webber for the win in Malaysia in March. (Didn’t Herr Schumacher push the boundaries a touch?)
Webber, despite his relations with Vettel having been turbulent to say the least, said the booboys were ‘not right’.
Vettel was trying his best to be sanguine, smiling his way through the controversy, as is his wont.
‘ It is in their genes,’ he said. ‘Fernando was there and the tifosi support Ferrari, so it was natural.’
For Vettel, a f ourth title is effectively won in the absence of some unimaginable turnaround.
The 26yearold has won both the last two races, at Spa and Monza, circuits that team principal Christian Horner had called their Achilles’ heel.
The race itself was hardly gripping. Starting from pole, Vettel led into the first corner and never looked like relinquishing his advantage over the next 53 laps to notch his third win at Monza, scene of his first career win for Toro Rosso in 2008.
The championship now moves from Europe to the Far East and America before concluding in Brazil seven races hence.
Alonso’s experience on t he podium was t he opposite of Vettel’s. He was cheered to the heavens and stayed behind afterwards to take pictures of the carnival vista on his phone.
It transported him away from the traumas of the previous day, when he sarcastically called the team ‘geniuses’ for their qualification strategy. Alonso is volatile but brilliant. Yesterday he drove with his usual tenacity to move up from fifth on the grid to take second.
‘Some people still try to create some tension between team and driver but here is the better symbol: zero tension and we fight for the championship always,’ he said.
Those close to the Spaniard tell a
different story: the tensions have been very real.
Alonso’s teammate Felipe Massa, who is tipped to be jettisoned for Kimi Raikkonen next season, was asked to let the Spaniard through.
He duly obliged. Webber, nursing a faulty gearbox, finished third and Massa fourth.
Paul di Resta’s race was over before it had really begun, the Scot later receiving a reprimand for his firstlap crash in which his Force India ran into the back of Romain Grosjean underbraking for the Roggia chicane.
Grosjean’s Lotus escaped without significant damage and went on to finish eighth, but di Resta was out.
‘I didn’t have vision of the apex,’ said di Resta. ‘Everything slowed and I tried to take avoiding action but, unfortunately, locked a wheel and tore the front end off the car.’
Hamilton, meanwhile, started 12th and finished ninth despite suffering radio failure and a slow puncture.
He got out of the car to concede the title from 81 points adrift. ‘I was angry and definitely thought that could be it,’ he reflected an hour or so later, with his dog Roscoe snoring at his feet.
‘ But I’ve been back with my engineers and I’m not going to give up. I’ve got to win every race basically. It is the tallest order. But I’m going to try.
‘I handled the disappointment of qualifying, came here energised, drove harder than ever and I felt like I had nothing left in my heart.
‘I was angry because it sucks when you do all that work, everyone in the factory and the garage does all that work, and you get two points.
‘You only make three places up. But that’s the way it goes.’