Left field

Formula One’s youngest world champion was always a man in a hurry

From the very first moment he arrived in Formula One as a curly-haired teenager, new world champion Sebastian Vettel was a young man in a hurry.

The 23-year-old Red Bull Driver, who became the youngest winner of the drivers’ championship with victory in Sunday’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, has set records from day one.

Within seconds of his debut in Friday practice at the 2006 Turkish Grand Prix, he had been fined for speeding in the pit lane. The youngest driver to take part in a practice session, in quick succession he became the youngest to score a point, youngest to secure pole position and youngest to win a grand prix.

Born in the same year that Red Bull sold their first can of energy drink, the race ace with the look of a tousled schoolboy and cheeky grin has always seemed a marketing match made in heaven for the newly crowned Formula One constructors’ champions.

Irreverent, with a penchant for British humour and the Beatles, there has never been any doubt that Vettel is Austrian-owned Red Bull’s blue-eyed boy.

Helmut Marko, the former grand prix racer who is a close advisor to Red Bull’s billionaire owner Dietrich Mateschitz, has championed his cause from an early age and was on the podium, showered in champagne, as Vettel celebrated the biggest win of his life on Sunday.

Vettel, only the second man to win the title for Germany after Michael Schumacher, has also saved the best for last, for the moment when it truly mattered.

F1 team orders — What’s all the fuss about?

Red Bull have gone out of their way to stress that they will not be handing out team orders at the decisive season-ending F1 Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi. Oh no. They do say they “expect” Sebastian Vettel to help team mate Mark Webber win the title should the situation arise but will not be “ordering” him to do so.

This seems to be an important distinction in a sport where the phrase “team orders” carries with it a stigma equivalent to “professional foul” or “ungentlemanly conduct” in soccer.

But really, what’s the big deal about a sports team telling its highly paid employees to perform in a certain way? In cycling, all riders are expected to follow team orders and in general there is not supposed to be ‘I’ in team sports. However, in F1 you cannot have a champion or a winner without an I. The I, the individual, is as important to many F1 fans as the team.

Red Bull are right to play the politically correct card — the furore that engulfed Ferrari earlier this season when Felipe Massa was politely urged to move over and let Fernando Alonso win the German Grand Prix will not be easily forgotten and a similar decision by Red Bull at the season finale could really see the wheels come off.

Or could it? In Hockenheim, Alonso looked well out of the running for the championship race and an emotionally charged Massa was heading for a first win since recovering from a near-fatal crash in Hungary in 2009.

In Abu Dhabi, missing out on the championship because you’re not allowed to tell your own team what to do could leave Red Bull feeling as if they have scored an own goal. However, they are also selling an image associated with their product — one of equal opportunities and fair competition.

Come Sunday in Abu Dhabi, a first-placed Vettel could well be all that is standing between a maiden drivers’ championship for his team mate Webber and the team as a whole. You could hazard a guess that even if he didn’t want to, Vettel would ultimately bow to the pressure – the repercussions on team morale would make for a difficult end of season party.

The F1 title race, in old money

McLaren’s Formula One champions Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton have both sought solace in the scoring system after recent setbacks.

But in fact, if they did the maths they might feel a little bit sore. Applying the 2009 points to the 2010 results so far, the title battle would actually be even tighter.

“I think the new points system has definitely amplified what people think of the standings, but I’ve always imagined the points as they would have been under last year’s system,” Button said after last weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix left him fifth overall and 25 points adrift of Red Bull’s championship leader Mark Webber.

“So, in old money, I’m 10 points off Mark, and Lewis is about eight or nine behind him. And, with four races to go, that’s not much at all.”

“When you say you’re 25 points off the lead, that sounds a lot – but it’s just easier for me to reference it by the old system. It makes it seem easier to understand and compute, too.”

Hamilton, who has retired from three of the last four races, is 20 points behind Webber with four races remaining while Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso is 11 off the Australian.

“That’s still less than a race win,” said Hamilton. “It’s easy to get disheartened by being 20 points away, because it sounds such a lot, but under last year’s rules, that’s only about eight points – and to be eight points off with four races left is nothing really.”

F1 is not all glamour

Who said Formula One was all glamour, parties and champagne?

Mark Webber provided a different insight on Wednesday as he sat in the Red Bull hospitality unit — the usual description of motorhome hardly applies to a floating palace moored to the Monaco harbourside — and described how his evening had panned out after winning the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona last weekend.

The Aussie hero had just taken the third win of his career, dominating the race from pole and beating the rest of the field into submission. So how did he celebrate? A night on the town perhaps? Not a bit of it.

After 66 laps, and 307km, of pounding around the Circuit de Catalunya, he got back in his loan car — a Renault, nothing fancy — and drove another 600km to Monaco.

“I drove here on Sunday night,” he said. “I’m not the most patient guy in the world when it comes to moving around. So I got in the car at seven o’clock. It was a bit of a late night on Sunday night.

“Ann (Neal, his partner) wasn’t too keen on driving so I had to do the whole trip myself. I did 900k on Sunday. 300 in the grand prix and 600 on the road.

Mosley gives F1 teams a parting gift

By anointing Jean Todt as his designated successor, Max Mosley has sent a pretty clear message to the troublesome Formula One teams.

They wanted him out but if they think they are going to get someone more amenable running motorsport’s world governing body, then they can think again.

In fact, they are mistaken if they think they have seen the back of Mosley himself.

As the Briton said in a letter to FIA member clubs on Wednesday, he hopes to play “a modest role” himself in any Todt administration after he stands down in October.

The Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) made their position pretty clear last month when Toyota’s John Howett, the group’s vice-chairman, said “we’d like someone independent… independent of any of the teams.”

Their immediate silence to Mosley’s letter was telling. As Alan Henry writes on the Guardian website, it “confirmed a deep-rooted suspicion that Todt is the favoured successor largely because he thinks like Mosley and, perhaps more worryingly for the teams, may act like him too.”

Todt might be seen as a Ferrari man, having presided over the golden Michael Schumacher era at the Italian team, but there is now a very different atmosphere at Maranello to when he called the shots.