Sebastian Vettel could be on his way to becoming F1’s greatest

The statistics supporting his claim to greatness are startling, as are the number of Formula One firsts and records he holds. At the age of 19 years and 53 days when he competed in the 2006 Turkish Grand Prix, he became the youngest F1 driver of all time. Not only that but he’s the youngest driver to set the fastest lap, the youngest to score an F1 point, the youngest to start a race on pole, to lead a race, to win from pole, to stand on the podium, and to win a grand prix.

And he was, of course, the youngest driver ever to win the world championship when he dramatically came from 14 points behind in the final race of the season last year, eclipsing Lewis Hamilton, Mark Webber and Fernando Alonso in Abu Dhabi with a perfect race to become world champion aged just 23 years and 135 days. With a lead of 112 points in the drivers championship despite facing four drivers with 11 championships between them, unless he gets run over by the proverbial bus he will soon become just the 15th multiple champion in F1 history and the youngest by far to secure two titles.

In his motorsport life before F1 there had been plenty of indications that he had the potential to become a star, yet the same is true of many young drivers and few make the turbo-charged impact of Vettel. From the moment that Robert Kubica was refused permission to race for Sauber at Indianapolis in 2007 because of the injuries sustained in a 170mph crash in Montreal the previous weekend, the German’s upward trajectory has been steep and rapid. He set the fastest time in practice that weekend, becoming the youngest driver to win a GP point in the race itself. A rare talent had announced itself.

It’s impossible to lean back into history and see how he would have coped against the likes of Alberto Ascari or Juan Manuel Fangio, but Vettel is on course to vie with the acknowledged greats. After 75 grands prix, his record of 18 wins is fit to be placed alongside that of just about any other driver: at the same stage Michael Schumacher had 19 wins, Ayrton Senna 13, Alain Prost 16 and Jackie Stewart 19. Vettel currently has a 75 per cent win rate for this championship, which eclipses even Schumacher’s 72 per cent in 2004 when he was at his most dominant and set the existing record of 13 wins in a season. If Vettel wins in Singapore he will have nine wins under his belt with another five races still to go.

The key to Vettel’s astonishing success with Red Bull over the past two seasons has been his stunning consistency. In the past 32 races he has only started a GP from further back than the second row once, while he has started on pole 20 times and has been on the front row of the grid 24 times.

Yet there are still those who believe he has much to prove. Last year those doubters focused on his inability to pull away from team-mate Mark Webber despite having the barely concealed support of the Red Bull team. Yet this year he has trounced Webber, scoring almost twice as many points as the Australian. Whether with Sauber, Toro Rosso or Red Bull, Vettel has now consistently outscored his team-mates, which remains the real benchmark for those within the sport. Indeed, the only team-mate who has ever got the better of him was the more experienced Scot, Paul Di Resta, in the 2006 F3 Euroseries.

In a sport where technology is so important, there are still those who believe that Vettel has a lot to prove. He can, they say, only win from the front, and struggles to perform the daring overtaking manoeuvres that characterised Michael Schumacher at his best. The Red Bull car, they say, is unbeatable on the growing number of identikit modern circuits but, on a real racer’s track such as Monaco or Monza, he has often come unstuck.

That may have been true once, but Vettel has done much recently to change that perception. Two weeks ago he sliced half a second off the best of his rivals’ times while qualifying in Monza – the fastest track in F1 – and pulled off an audacious passing move on Alonso before going on to dominate the race.

Most tellingly, when it comes to his approach to racing, the driver the German press calls “Schumacher with a smile” is becoming more like his compatriot every day. There are many superficial similarities, such as their humble origins in small-town Germany and learning to kart at the Kerpen circuit near Cologne, but it is in his technical understanding and relationship with the mechanics that Vettel most closely resembles his boyhood hero. Those long hours spent working with his engineers have proved vital this year, as has his canniness. The Red Bull may have good straight-line speed but it struggled to accelerate out of corners sufficiently quickly so, in a tactical masterstroke, Vettel had the gearing changed to ensure he beat rivals out of corners and make overtaking him on the high-speed sections far more difficult.

Ever respectful in public, in private, friends say Vettel is determined to eclipse Schumacher, whose seven championships came with two teams, Benetton and Ferrari. Vettel says that, before his career is over, he will have also driven for both McLaren and Ferrari, with the unspoken implication that he will beat Schumacher’s mark of winning championships with two different teams. There are many who believe he will achieve that aim, not least his engineer Giorgio Ascanelli, who worked with Senna, Schumacher and now Vettel, and says that “twice in my life have I experienced perfection, once with Senna, again with Vettel – Schumacher was different because he had to work harder for his success.”

There are many who believe that not only does Vettel have the talent, he also has the temperament. “Sebastian is such an outstanding driver partly because he is so down to earth and straightforward,” says former F1 world champion Nikki Lauda. “He does not bother with a manager and does everything himself. There’s no bulls*** about him – he’s the tops.”

Whether that is true will become more clear this afternoon, although only time will tell whether Vettel can go on and establish a legacy to live alongside the likes of Senna and Schumacher. Either way, it promises to be quite some ride.