‘One of F1’s greatest’: Why F1 won’t let Sebastian Vettel retire quietly

Binotto admitted that telling Vettel he wouldn’t be retained for 2021 was not an easy task.

“Difficult for myself, coming to the end, somehow to announce to him that we will not renew,” said the Italian. “And that maybe has been the most difficult task I’ve done myself through my career. Because when you love such a person and you really enjoy working with him, it’s always difficult to come to the end and take a decision somehow to announce it.

“So I think it has been an important moment as well for my career itself. Through difficulties you become stronger. But it’s the one that we will remember as the most difficult one.”

Vettel regards his Ferrari years as a failure, because he didn’t win a title with the Maranello team. So does Binotto agree?

“I think he is somehow right because when he joined Ferrari, he was ambitious, his objective was to win the title with Ferrari and I think together with himself, it was our dream and our objective as well. So it has been a failure for him but it has been a failure all together as a team.

“He has been very close, or at least the closest he has been was ’17 and ’18, so we had a few opportunities. But we didn’t get it, and I think somehow when your final objective is to do that, and if you do not achieve it, if it’s a failure.”

Vettel won the British Grand Prix for Ferrari in 2018, but the title remained elusive

Ferrari

He didn’t fail at Red Bull, where he won four titles on the bounce in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. That run alone should earn him a spot among the all-time greats. Yes, for much of that time RBR clearly had the best car, but in two of those years it went down to the wire, and Vettel really had to work for it.

It says a lot that despite leaving the team in the lurch when he signed for Ferrari, Vettel is as loved in Milton Keynes as he is in Maranello.

“He’s just a consume professional,” says RBR boss Christian Horner. “He came to us as a young kid with a brace and a funny haircut. And he just grew up in that time as a Red Bull junior.

‘Is that Vettel with the donkey from Shrek?’ — someone nearly drove off the road!

“He’s just got such an endearing personality, he’d turn up with chocolates for the receptionist and the secretaries, and he just ended himself to everybody. He had the ability to mimic and impersonate so many different accents from cockney slang to Nigel Mansell. His Jean Todt was legendary.

“So, just a brilliant, brilliant character. And an even more brilliant driver. I mean, what we achieved together, the four consecutive world championships, the way that he went into the final race here, in 2010, and in Brazil, 2012, phenomenal, phenomenal memories.

“He just got better and better. I mean, ’10, it went down to the wire; ’11, he was truly dominant; ’12 he never gave up and came right; he won four critical races in ’12. He’d won one race before we left Europe that year and then delivered incredibly.

“Then ’13, he was just on a different level. Those nine consecutive victories were insane, and the level of intensity that he had to deliver that was outstanding.”