Sebastian Vettel: Hostile Questions; Acting Like A World ChampionJuly 11, 2011 – It’s impossible not to be increasingly impressed with Sebastian Vettel. I mentioned on Twitter that he was at the circuit relatively late on Saturday evening, signing autographs and posing for photographs with every fan who asked him – but I didn’t have space to add that he did all that with a smile and a laugh – even when the picture didn’t work first time around. The world of tennis is currently luxuriating in two players called Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal – icons who bring both good manners and dignity to their world – and we have Sebastian Vettel in F1. He is a driver who seems to be to be giving back to his sport at least as much as he has received.
I was impressed, too, with his reaction to a particularly hostile “question” in the post-race press conference at Silverstone.
“Isn’t this a sham?” asked The Daily Mirror’s Byron Young. “You are the World Champion. You’re supposed to be the best driver in the world and Red Bull are reduced to begging on the radio to make your team-mate slow down so he doesn’t overtake you. This suggests that the results aren’t really what we’ve seen. How do we know you’re a worthy World Champion?”
Can you imagine how Michael Schumacher would have reacted to that sort of question after Austria, 2002? Or how any of the recent World Champions would have reacted to any suggestion that they were “unworthy” of wearing the title?
Seb, in quick response, was a masterpiece of diplomacy:
“I finished second, I think,” he said with a sparkle in his eye and that trademark grin. “Mark tried to pass me. I stayed ahead. Clearly you could see that he was quicker at that stage. If I wasn’t racing, I would have waved him past. Sure, the last thing you want is to do something bad for the team. If it would have been the other way around there would have been no point. I would have like to have overtaken Mark at that point but there would have been no point in trying to do something stupid, especially from the team’s point of view. So I don’t know what the big fuss is really.”
Concise. Polite. Logical. (Note the use of the diplomatic “I stayed ahead” rather than the egocentric “He couldn’t pass me”….)
Still, though, Byron came back:
“But this is motor racing. It’s about beating a guy on the track, not the team deciding who wins what.”
Seb: “I think we were racing. It was not scheduled, as in ‘I move right, you move left, I move left, you move right, I brake here, you brake there’. Mark was flat out and tried to race me as hard as he could and he didn’t find a way past. To me, at this stage, it’s quite amusing…”
As I say, I can think of about a hundred alternative replies that Seb could have given to all of this – particularly in light of the aggression of the questions. Instead, he chose the tack that leant dignity to Mark, logic to the team, politeness to the journalist and subliminal credit to himself (if you looked a little deeper than the obvious, outer layers of what he was saying).
Again, ten out of ten. He’s an excellent driver and World Champion.
