COOPER: Pressure Building For Vettel

Formula 1

COOPER: Pressure Building For Vettel

Sebastian Vettel's bad day in Belgium could reflect a lack of mental toughness...

Adam Cooper | http://www.speedtv.com | Posted September 01, 2010 Balen (BEL)

Sebastian Vettel has made costly mistakes in the last two races. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

After last weekend’s Belgian GP, the battle for the World Championship suddenly looks a little spread out, given that Fernando Alonso is now 41 points off the lead. To some degree that’s an illusion created by the new points system.

To get a clearer idea – or at least make some kind of comparison with the title fights of the past – you have to divide everything by 2.5. Whereas Alonso in fifth place was eight "old" points off the lead before Belgium, he is now 16.4 behind leader Lewis Hamilton, with six races still to come.

Bearing in mind that Kimi Raikkonen won from 17 behind with two races to go in 2007, all is not lost for any of the top five candidates.

And that includes of course Sebastian Vettel, the man who has received such a battering since his eventful afternoon on Sunday. He is the equivalent of 12.4 behind Lewis, so it’s way too early to write him off. Vettel himself said that after the race.

“We’ll see,” he shrugged when asked about his hopes. “It’s still a long way. It gets more important every race now, and today was not ideal. Some points we lost, so we need to see what we can do in the next races, but it’s still a long way.

“Obviously the target was to be ahead of everyone else. There were some easy points for us to pick up today – at least second or third – but now we have none for today. Let’s see for the next race.”

Red Bull knew that Spa would not be the ideal stage for the RB6, and thus Mark Webber’s pole and second place came as a nice surprise, especially given that the next track in Monza will be even less favorable to the package.

Webber’s result was hardly of much comfort to Vettel, who despite his outward optimism, must be concerned that his first title is slipping away.

Of course, he wasn’t the only one to make mistakes in Spa. Hamilton was so lucky to get away with his trip across the gravel on slicks, and had he drifted just a couple of inches further to the left, he would have collected the tire wall and gone no further. But he made it out in once piece – I’m sure that even his biggest fans would not deny that there was at least some luck involved – and with his lead intact.

Alonso meanwhile had an absolute nightmare of a race. He gambled on a wet set-up and – with that presumably compromising him – he qualified only 10th. He was an innocent victim of the assault from Rubens Barrichello on the first lap, so we can’t blame him for that, but the snap decision to go to inters when he ducked straight into the pits proved to be a disaster, and he had to come right back in for slicks.

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After that he plugged away and against all the odds, made it into the points. His wet set-up should have given him a hand in the closing wet laps and he just might have made up more ground, but instead he got on a wet curb and crashed.

Luckily for both the Spaniard and Ferrari, Vettel’s problems took the attention away – just as few people noticed the first lap clash between the red cars in Silverstone, because of Vettel’s own lap one drama there.

But if you add up the mistakes that Fernando has made this year, including his expensive practice crash in Monaco and inexplicable jumped start in China, it’s a long list.

All these guys sometimes get it wrong, because they are performing at such a high level, and the pressures on them are enormous. Not so long ago Webber was in the spotlight. He screwed up in Australia, was (rightly or wrongly) blamed by some for not creating space for Vettel in Turkey, and had a disastrous race in Valencia, where he had a terrible first lap and then struck Heikki Kovalainen. This stuff happens.

The point is that Webber and Alonso have a lot of experience, and it’s so easy to forget that Vettel is still only 23, and in only his third full season.

Timewise, there’s an exact parallel with Michael Schumacher in 1994. Michael might have won the title that year, but he didn’t always get it right. In fact you could compare Schumacher’s penalty for overtaking pole man Damon Hill at Silverstone that year with the drive-through Vettel received for dropping too far behind in the safety car queue in Hungary. A silly lapse that won’t happen again.

Having said that, Michael didn’t actually throw away points with a driving error until Adelaide, when Hill pushed him into a mistake and he famously recovered (and won the title) by driving into Damon.

The problem for Vettel is that Spa has come so soon after Turkey, where he also had heavy contact with another car. Rightly perhaps we perceive that this sort of mistake – as opposed to a simple solo spin – as being that much more noteworthy. Funny enough, Schumacher himself was twice a victim of clumsy assaults from Hill in 1995.

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Adam Cooper

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