Great expectations

The kid sitting opposite has a black-and-blue finger. It’s the index digit on his right hand. The top of it was stitched back on a few weeks ago and it still looks swollen, sore, tender-to-the-touch, painful. It was near-severed in a 170mph racing-car accident seven weeks earlier at the Spa-Francorchamps circuit in Belgium – the most fearsome European track still in regular use.

The kid, Sebastian Vettel, finds it all (the crash, the injury, the fact that right now he’s sitting in the hospitality unit of a Formula One team, in Istanbul, preparing to take part in his first grand prix weekend) pretty amusing. “Look,” he says, roughly grabbing the fated finger with his left hand, “it doesn’t hurt.”

He wiggles it left, right, back and forth, as if he wants to pull the bloody thing off again. It makes this onlooker wince. He laughs at my discomfort. “Don’t worry,” he says, “it’s fine.” And he leaves the pulsating body part in peace. ? Good job, for moments later, he needs it again. A press aide has joined us and she’s holding a very significant piece of paper. It’s a superlicence issued by the FIA (the governing body of motor racing) and it’s Vettel’s ticket to ride in Formula One. Without it, he’s not allowed to compete in the world’s fastest racing series. But first he must sign it – which leads to a comedy moment involving pen, throbbing finger and autograph.

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And with that briefest rite of passage, a footnote of sports history is written. On August 25, 2006, aged 19 years 53 days, Sebastian Vettel became the youngest person ever eligible to race in a grand prix. Hardly out of nappies and already setting records.

That same weekend he managed to set the fastest time in a practice session and earned himself a fine for speeding in the pitlane (a no-no in Formula One, where team mechanics are permanently at risk of being flattened by too-fast race cars). Not bad for a rookie. Not bad for a teenager who looks like he took the wrong turn out of the college gates in his home town of Heppenheim, Germany, and somehow found himself in a Formula One car.

Heads turned, people noticed.

He didn’t start that weekend’s Turkish Grand Prix, as he was only present in a ‘third driver’ capacity – back-up to the two nominated race drivers. He did, though, succeed where many sportsmen fail throughout a competitive career: he started to make his name.

For the rest of that season, as BMW’s ‘third man’, he continued where he’d begun. At the Italian Grand Prix a couple of weeks later, he was fastest in both practice sessions and he sashayed through the remaining events, impressing the team with his speed, maturity and good grace.

Impressing – but not surprising, for Vettel was already firmly on the radars of F1’s mover-shakers. One such was BMW Motorsport boss Dr Mario Theissen, who had watched Vettel, a former Red Bull Junior Team driver, progress through lower-league racing categories before a breakthrough year, 2004, in Formula BMW. That season, driving cars designed to look and feel like mini-F1 machines and groom future superstars, Vettel won 18 from 20 races, and finished second and third in the two he didn’t win.

Theissen was impressed: “Sebastian displayed outstanding talent,” he says, “and his results record remains unequalled. He was still only 19 when he drove his first Formula One race for us and already, after only one full racing season in F1, he ranks among the well-established drivers.”

The grand prix race debut Theissen refers to came at the 2006 US Grand Prix, at Indianapolis. Substituting for an injured Robert Kubica (the Polish driver who only a week earlier had survived a truly horrifying accident at the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal), Vettel started seventh and finished eighth, and thereby scored a point on his grand prix debut. Another of those small, significant moments that pepper the CVs of guys marked for greatness.

More would follow – and fast.

By the time of the Hungarian Grand Prix, four races later, he had switched teams to come back into the Red Bull fold with Scuderia Toro Rosso. There were no points this time, but he was driving a car not considered among the fastest machines. Speed, results were initially hard to come by.

All that was about to change. Formula One headed off for its season-closing races in Japan and China, both of which were affected by rain.

Water on racetracks can be a wonderful thing. It reduces the grip between tyre and tarmac. It makes cars harder to drive. It makes accidents more likely and – crucially – it places a premium on driver skills. All of F1’s greatest, most talented drivers have stood out from their peers on soggy tracks – Stirling Moss, Jackie Stewart, Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher. Vettel, baby-faced, precociously talented Sebastian Vettel was about to show he was made of the same stuff.

In Japan, at the Fuji Speedway, he was running a confident third in a deluge behind Lewis Hamilton and Mark Webber, before an extremely unfortunate prang with Webber (driving for sister team Red Bull Racing) that eliminated them both.

It was an excruciating blot on the copybook; one that reduced Vettel briefly to tears. But only a week later, in Shanghai, in wet, though less treacherous conditions, he steered his car to fourth place.

This was A Big Deal. Vettel’s team was among the least well resourced and to have one of its cars jousting with the big boys was akin to Hull beating Arsenal in the Premier League earlier this year. There were tears again after the race, this time of joy.

The team’s technical director Giorgio Ascanelli (a Sopranos-tough Italian) remembers it as a showcase performance that marked Vettel out as a coming man. “He was outstanding,” Ascanelli recalls. “Ahead of him was Felipe Massa in a Ferrari and over the closing laps Sebastian gained 18 seconds. There’s no way he should have been able to do that.”

All this though was a mere amuse-bouche for one of the most remarkable main courses ever delivered in Formula One (and for a sport fuelled by excess, that’s no small claim). ?

Vettel, still with Scuderia Toro Rosso, won last year’s Italian Grand Prix at Monza (no, he dominated it) from pole position, to become the sport’s youngest-ever winner. Aged 21 years, 73 days, he snatched that particular accolade from Fernando Alonso (who won the 2003 Hungarian GP aged 22 years 26 days and is now a 27-year-old double world champion).

The lachrymose scenes that greeted Vettel aren’t often witnessed in such a hard-edged, money-fixated sport, but he gave himself, and his team (most of whom had joined when it was still known as Minardi, F1’s perennial minnow) a day none would ever forget.

He says: “When I landed pole position in qualifying, the day before, I screamed over the intercom to the team and I was happy. But in the race itself, I was surprised; you’ve just taken the chequered flag in first, the race is over and you’ve won your first grand prix. To start with I didn’t understand and started thinking, ‘What do you say at times like this?’ In the end my engineer, who’s a very quiet type, came on the radio and told me that I’d just won the Italian Grand Prix. I turned on the radio and started talking very slowly and collectedly, thanking people. It’s dumb; you work your whole life for a moment like this and when it finally happens, you don’t know where you are. But by the end of the slow-down lap it clicked and then I turned the radio back on again and screamed my thanks, this time in Italian. No one had taken the team formerly known as Minardi seriously for years and I was able to give them their first victory; that was unique. You can give people so much joy with so little, just by driving a car for a couple of hours!”

Aficionados will reminisce, misty-eyed, about ‘Vettel’s Monza’ in years to come, but for those who’d already watched closely, this was a result-in-waiting. After teething troubles with a new braking system in the early 2008 races, Vettel finished fifth at Monaco, having started 19th; he scored points in Canada, despite starting from the pitlane, and at the European Grand Prix in Valencia, he started and finished sixth, keeping supposedly bigger players behind.

Ascanelli, who, earlier in his career, enjoyed a famously close working relationship with the late triple world champion Ayrton Senna, remembers the Valencia weekend as a turning point in the development of a young sportsman emerging from prospect to player. “On the Friday afternoon,” he says, “Sebastian did a fantastic lap time in a car that was heavy with full fuel tanks. I asked him if he understood what he had done and how he had done it. He said: ‘Let me go and think about it.’ He did and then he went out and repeated similar times. That for me is the characteristic that marks out the guys who are simply talented from the guys who can become champions. They need to have something between their ears. Spare mental capacity, if you like. For someone like Sebastian, the process of making a racing car go very fast isn’t that difficult, so they have space to think, which means they’re always composed.”

Composure, intelligence, natural ability? the common currency of champions in any sport. Is it too soon to be thinking of Vettel in these terms? Sir Jackie Stewart, world champion in 1969, ’71 and ’73 and to this day an acute observer of the sport, thinks not: “In a funny sort of way I think Sebastian can be compared to the young Alain Prost or Ayrton Senna. You can see the natural gift and the intelligence, but because he’s still such a young guy he doesn’t yet have all the layers of polish that the top drivers acquire after many years in the sport. But there’s no question he has absolutely everything he needs to become a ‘big’ driver. One of the top stars. You could see that by the way he handled his win.”

While the emotional release of that Monza day underscored every cliché about the Italian sporting psyche, it also demonstrated very publicly the sincere affection in which Vettel’s team held him.

Vettel, street-savvy and dosed with the necessary levels of self-protecting egotism every top-line sports star requires, is nonetheless refreshingly open, guile-free and so far unaffected by the baubles and trinkets that prove a distraction to so many in F1. He likes to watch British TV comedies (Little Britain, Monty Python); loves the Beatles and buys music on vinyl. On a human level, he’s the antithesis of the vacuum-packed, pre-processed, speak-no-evil sportsman-cum-marketing commodity deemed appropriate by an iPod-YouTube generation.

“He knew how to get the team around him,” says one who worked closely with him last year, “and he would always say ‘hi’ to everyone in the morning, shake hands and that sort of thing. He got quite a reception at the Toro Rosso Christmas party.”

What, then, for 2009? He has stepped up from Toro Rosso to Red Bull Racing, where he’ll be teamed with by far the fastest team-mate he has yet encountered, Mark Webber. The sport’s regulations have been extensively overhauled so all teams will be entering uncharted technical waters and Vettel has the burden of his own early success to live up to. Quite a challenge?

His new team boss, Christian Horner, is sure he’s up to it: “The early indications are that he’s a very rounded guy. He has a wise head on his shoulders for someone so young and he has all the trademarks of a driver who can go on to achieve something really superb within Formula One.”

Flashback for a second to Monza ’08, a famous day that for many would mark a career pinnacle. For Sebastian Vettel, one senses, it was a mere foothill.

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