The contrast between the two Ferrari drivers after the Italian Grand Prix could not have been more extreme.
Charles Leclerc stood on the podium as a winner for a second time in a week, soaking up the adoration of thousands of tifosi celebrating the first Ferrari win in Italy since 2010.
Down in the paddock, Sebastian Vettel, the four-time world champion who started the season as the team’s number-one driver, was facing the media, forced to talk about the latest in a long line of errors that date back to June 2018.
This was Vettel’s ninth major mistake in 27 races since last year’s French Grand Prix. He has been keeping up a hit rate of one every three events and if he is bemused and perplexed by what is going on, he is far from the only one inside Formula 1.
This one was quite possibly the worst of the lot. Most of the others have come in battle with another car, or under pressure. In this, he was running in fourth place, keeping pace with the three leaders – Leclerc and the two Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas – when he simply lost
control and spun going through the Ascari chicane on the sixth lap.
That would have been bad enough, but then came the really unbelievable part. Vettel set about rejoining the race without looking for or apparently thinking about any other cars, and he collided with the Racing Point of Lance Stroll, who was running in seventh place.
It was akin to pulling out of a T-junction without looking if anyone was coming. An astonishing error for any racing driver to make, let alone one of Vettel’s experience and expertise.
And it was all the more astonishing given that Vettel put himself in a position to be T-boned at high speed, exactly the same situation that led to the death of Formula 2 driver Anthoine Hubert at the Belgian Grand Prix.
He had no explanation.
“Obviously I am not happy with it,” he said. “I lost the rear and couldn’t catch it.
“I struggled a couple of times to get the car going. A couple of times I got the anti-stall and I struggled to get in the right direction as well so I couldn’t see him. It was impossible to see the cars on the left. I was stuck also a bit on the kerb so that didn’t help.”
He was clearly thinking that the fastest cars would have built a gap and he might have clear track to rejoin. But it was still early in the race, and the gap was never going to be that big.
On the face of it, this appears to have fit into a pattern that seems familiar with Vettel’s errors in recent times. In stressed moments, a sort of red mist seems to descend that reduces his capacity for rational thinking.
The concerning thing is that the errors keep happening. After making a series last year, Vettel was supposed to go away for the winter and think about how to stop it happening. But they have continued into 2019 with more or less the same frequency.
Vettel said the qualifying controversy had not affected him, and that he had not lost any love for F1.
“No, not really, I haven’t,” he said. “I still love what I do but when you’re not doing well when you know you can do well, you can’t be happy.”
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff advised against criticising Vettel too much.
“Today is a bad race for him,” Wolff said. “He had a spell of bad races. I’m just saying don’t write him off because he is a four-time world champion and the difference between the great ones and the good ones is that the great ones are able to get up again. I have no doubt he can do that.”
Hamilton said something similar after the last big Vettel error. Problem is, right now there is not a lot of evidence to suggest they are right.
