Under those circumstances, Vettel could cease to worry about strategy calls, pit-lane operations or whether the right tyres were being fitted and could just relax into extracting the maximum from his driving skills. Perhaps he has tried to model his move to Ferrari upon his mentor’s, Michael Schumacher, who was the nucleus of a very tightly-knit team that was focussed around him.īut what Schumacher had in his favour was Ross Brawn running the team with a calm authority, Jean Todt keeping the senior managerial pressures away from the race team and Nigel Stepney as chief mechanic drilling the team like an army sergeant. That was the case last year and it’s even more so this season.Įxcessive pressure - especially over issues outside of your direct control - is especially stressful and it seems entirely logical that this should be linked with a pattern of errors and wrong split-second decisions. That’s quite aside from the pressure of representing Ferrari as the lead driver when it has given him a potentially title-winning car. With his mind thus split between roles, amid the constant concern about whether everything has been thought through in a fast, ever-moving environment, he’s feeling the pressure in a way he wasn’t at his previous teams.

So Vettel is driving the best car being run by less than the best team. Much as Ferrari have been perhaps the most technically-creative team of all in the last couple of seasons (for the first time in a decade), it is still operationally a shaky one on a race weekend.

At Ferrari, Vettel finds himself trying to manage the team from the cockpit - clearly because he feels he needs to. At the more smoothly-drilled Red Bull team, usually all he had to do was drive.

Mark hughes f1