The four-time F1 world champion Vettel joined the renamed Aston Martin team after leaving Ferrari for this season and joined Lance Stroll.
While Aston Martin dropped to seventh place in the constructors’ championship due to the downforce reductions under the modified regulations for 2021, Vettel was able to achieve the team’s best result of the season with second place in Azerbaijan.
Vettel was in Hungary shortly before the win, where he finished second before he was later disqualified for a technical violation. The team announced in September that Vettel would stay by Stroll’s side until 2022.
When asked about Vettel’s integration into the team this year, Aston Martin boss Szafnauer said: “He was brilliant.
“He’s such a man of integrity, he works hard, has a great work ethic and leaves no stone unturned.
“The engineers enjoy working with him, the mechanics love him as a person. He’s just a real guy. And that’s a long way in life. “
Sebastian Vettel, Aston Martin AMR21, in the pit lane
Photo by: Jerry Andre / Motorsport Images
Vettel has received wide praise this year for its off-track efforts to raise awareness of important environmental issues and highlight social issues, such as advocating LGBT + rights in Hungary.
Although he has known Vettel for over a decade, Szafnauer found it interesting to see so many of the qualities he had heard of through a professional relationship and was not surprised by his work ethic over the year.
“Everyone else who worked closely with him talked about him in the same way that I talk about him now,” said Szafnauer.
“And socially, I could also see these traits. So I was surprised too, no, but I was pleased to learn what I thought that his actions confirmed him. “
Szafnauer admitted that Vettel needed a few races to get to know the team and to bring himself up to date, but felt that he was “a good job”.
“His greatest quality as a racing driver is to work tirelessly to get faster and faster,” said Szafnauer.
“He even does that in the race. So when he starts a race, he looks at other drivers and lines that they have ridden in the race to see if he can learn to drive faster within a race or to protect the tires more, or whatever You have to do. For me this is his greatest asset. “
Szafnauer named Hungary Vettel’s strongest race of the season, where he put Esteban Ocon under pressure for a race in the fight for victory before finishing second and later being disqualified.
“Although the result didn’t count through no fault of my own, I found that he drove a brilliant race in Budapest and tried tiredly and tried to overtake Ocon,” said Szafnauer.
“He really wanted to win. It’s so difficult to overtake in Budapest unless you have a massive pace advantage that we didn’t have.
“If it had been a little different, a little faster pit stop, we would have just left the pits in front of Ocon, I think he would have left him” [behind]. “
