Is Vettel the new face of German domination?

If a heavyweight Mafioso desires something, his first approach may not necessarily involve violence or the threat of it. He may begin by offering money, lots of money, or a favour so appealing that the hardest of hearts is enticed. There are useful lessons to be learned from this technique. Lewis Hamilton stated somewhat rashly last week that Red Bull was not much more than “a drinks company”, an upstart which hadn’t earned the right to be mixing things at the top with the likes of the mighty McLaren an Ferrari; teams with reputations carefully forged over generations of racing tradition. Well, Red Bull appear to be reading from a different script from the McLaren one because the best that Hamilton could do against the imperious Sebastian Vettel at the Australian Grand prix was come within eight tenths of a second of the German’s gearbox. With that sort of lead over the man who eventually stood on the number two step of the podium, Vettel could just as easily have been driving his own race by himself. The best advice for Mr Hamilton is not to whinge about the symptoms but deal instead with the cause of the problem. Get a couple of lieutenants and put them on a plane to Sicily with a clear message firmly installed in their brains. “Find a couple of scary but discreet chaps. Tell them to get in touch with Adrian Newey in the manner only trained Mafia chaps can (I have no objections to severed horses heads in beds). The important thing to make sure of is that Newey is never again seen anywhere near an F1 garage or workshop.” The time for this sort of approach is ripe. Ferrari tried engaging the services of Mr Newey before the start of this season and offered tempting inducements: more money, a top of the range Ferrari and a beautiful Emiliano-Romagnolo villa with a well stocked wine cellar. Newey declined. He likes it at Red Bull, he said. The thought of moving to Italy did not particularly enthuse him either. This being the case, unless Hamilton or some other forward thinking person does as I suggest, I fear the die is cast. Red Bull might be a drinks company but Christian Horner, the man in charge of running its F1 team, has the foresight of a falcon. Horner made two far-reaching recruitment decisions that will haunt the world of F1 for years. The first and most important was to hire Adrian Newey, the unequalled expert of racing car design, as the chief designer of Red Bull’s F1 cars. Adrian Newey is an alchemist, a man who goes to sleep at night and dreams in binary code, a genius. In his hands Williams and then McLaren were the class of the field. Following his departure, first Williams and then McLaren faltered. The answer to the question “how does one put together a championship winning Formula One car” is invariably “get Newey!” The second Horner inspired initiative was to spot the potential in a young German called Sebastian Vettel and sign him to Red Bull early. We saw the promise of the Red Bull car and driver last year as Vettel managed ten pole positions and a world championship in a season filled to the brim with exceptional talent. From the evidence of Vettel’s complete domination of Saturday and Sunday in Melbourne, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I hope to goodness that this is not the case, but the evidence of the Australian Grand Prix is that we have entered a new era of unrelenting domination akin to the mind-numbingly boring Michael Schumacher years. Word on the street before Melbourne was that McLaren had produced a pig’s ear of a car and could pretty much be written off. I didn’t see anything to suggest that at all. Hamilton’s second place in both qualifying and the race was respectable. Jenson Button wasn’t too far back but, uncharacteristically, he allowed himself to fall for the oldest trick in the book. Felipe Massa’s Ferrari was clearly slower than Button’s McLaren but Massa held his nerve and wouldn’t allow himself to be harassed by an increasingly irritable Button. The trick worked: Button “lost it”; he made a mistake and found himself forced to use a run-off area to get ahead of Massa. The Ferrari came into the pits soon thereafter so there wasn’t sufficient time for Button to realise his mistake and give the place back to Massa. As he should have expected, he was promptly slapped with a drive-through penalty which cost him at least twenty seconds and any chance of a podium position. Thinking back to Australian Grands Prix over the years, I have seen many that were better. Apart from Button’s gullibility, the only other incident which sticks in the memory was the hot headed Brazilian driver, Rubens Barrichello, deciding to t-bone poor old Nico Rosberg’s Mercedes so cruelly that the German had to retire. The race was largely a dull affair. I am sure Vitaly Petrov will disagree with me, though. Consistency and determination enabled him to bag the third podium place in his Lotus Renault and he thereby became the first ever Russian to win a Formula One trophy. The lesson from Australia is that Ferrari and McLaren have to raise their game considerably if this season is going to be worthy of the description “championship”. That, or book that flight to Palermo… Gitau 28 March 2011