On Track and Off, Vettel Sets His Own Pace

Vettel, a 26-year-old German, is the youngest driver to score points in Formula One, the youngest Grand Prix winner and the youngest world champion. He has already clinched this year’s world championship, his fourth in a row, with a record-tying 11 victories, including one in which the nearest competitor finished 30 seconds behind. In 118 Grand Prix starts, he has won 37 times, bettering even Tiger Woods, who won 34 of 130 PGA Tour starts before turning 27.   

Vettel wastes no time in his car, but away from the cockpit he is constantly running behind. On Thursday, three days before the United States Grand Prix, Vettel lost so much ground in his morning appearances that at the stroke of noon his handlers’ smartphones began to ping with alarms.

The same intellectual curiosity that drives his success on the track impedes his progress off it. His television interviews exceeded their allotted time because he asked so many questions, a quick meet-and-greet with a contest winner turned into another unhurried exchange, and a photo shoot that was scheduled to last 10 minutes took almost an hour because Vettel was not wired to be a passive participant.

If he could be granted one wish, he once said, it would be that people were a little less stressed, starting presumably with those in his inner circle. On Thursday, as Vettel’s appointments rammed into one another like cars on a track, his personal assistant, Britta Roeske, tapped out replies on her smartphone to Vettel’s trainer, who was furious that he had not stopped for lunch, and to the engineers, who were threatening to start a scheduled meeting without him.

Vettel’s mind has many gears, none of which are neutral. In conversation he shifts from one detail to another until a vast terrain is covered. Adrian Newey, who designed Vettel’s car, said, “He can drive while considering and planning what he’s going to do next, and then get out of the car and continue to analyze and learn what happened so that next time he’s got that tiny bit more knowledge.”

Outsiders have a hard time seeing the man for the machine. Many drivers in the glamour-rich, cash-poor sport attribute Vettel’s success to his Red Bull Infiniti partnership, as if he were behind the wheel of a Brink’s truck.

Scott Dixon, who last month won his third IndyCar Series championship, said jokingly that Vettel’s dominance was making Formula One boring.

“Somebody was telling me the other night after they won the championship, what they need to do is have all the drivers put their keys in a bowl and then you pick out the keys and drive that car,” Dixon said.

Mark Webber, a Red Bull teammate with whom Vettel has clashed, said: “The car is a big part of it, but it’s not everything. His attention to the small details is what sets him apart.”

 With a victory Sunday, Vettel would become the first Formula One drive to win eight consecutive races in a season and would supplant his childhood idol and countryman Michael Schumacher as the single-season victory leader.

The pursuit of history, Vettel said, “is not the reason why I jump in the car.” The pursuit of happiness is what drives him.

“To be honest with you, I just love what I do,” he said. “I love getting in the car. The feeling I get inside the car and the level of satisfaction, I haven’t found anything else that makes me as happy.”

A Desire to Win

Vettel, open-wheel racing’s leading man, is the most famous athlete most Americans have never heard of, so he was not sure what reception awaited him during his first visit to Nashville, the site of Nissan-Infiniti’s North American headquarters.

“You have low expectations when you come here,” Vettel said, referring to the United States, “because you don’t know how much people know about Formula One.”