By now we must be getting tired of the word “dominance” being used in the same sentence as “Red Bull” or “Verstappen” in recent times, but the man who played a big part in a previous era of dominance with the Milton Keynes based team has spoken out in defence of Red Bull’s current champion, as well as praising the team’s performance as a whole. In Vettel’s 2011 season with Red Bull, he racked up 15 podium positions, 11 wins and 392 points, while Jenson Button who finished second in the championship managed 272 points in the 19 race season and at the time this dominant period drew criticisms of making F1 “boring”.
Speaking while attending last weekend’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, where he was driving some of his sustainably fuelled class F1 machinery, the recently retired four-time world champion has responded to claims the current Red Bull run of form is making for “boring” viewing.
With many citing the quality of the machinery Verstappen is equipped with as the deciding factor in his success, Vettel was quick to point out that being consistent and making no mistakes is the key to glory across the season:
“You have to give him credit, he is performing fantastic. He is incredibly talented and makes no mistakes.”
Vettel used Verstappen’s teammate Sergio Perez as an example for how just having the fastest car on the grid does not guarantee success:
“I mean, Sergio [Perez] is not a bad driver but do you see how quickly things can go wrong? Some Sundays, it might be easy to get through and, other Sundays, it might be harder.”
No stranger to a long run of form himself, the German knows exactly what it takes to maintain this sort of streak, only recently being displaced by the young Dutchman as Red Bull Racing’s most successful driver in terms of race wins.
“As soon as you drive at the front because you are doing well, people are quick to say that it is boring and that you win ‘easily.’…But there is much more at play than just lap times. I’m sure Lewis Hamilton never had it easy during his dominant years, just as, for example, Michael Schumacher, Mika Hakkinen and myself never had it easy. It is an incredible achievement to conceive and build a car that can beat the competition in every race weekend. The fact that Red Bull does well every weekend is due to perfection, consistency and the qualities of the team.”
Ultimately though, does “Inspector Seb” think that Red Bull can achieve a feat that has never occurred in the past despite a number of occasions when it was on the table – and win every race in a single season? According to him,“nothing is impossible”:
“With the car that they have, there is a chance yes, but it’s also a lot more to it – it’s reliability, first lap incidents, the freak stuff that can happen in a race…But again, if you’re on top of your game, you learn to control these things more and more. You have this sort of 360 view of what’s going on in a race….So yeah, it’s probably possible. It was probably possible last year, it’s possible this year. It was possible for Mercedes for a couple of years. We haven’t seen one constructor winning all the races – 1988 was very close, so we’ll see!”
