After a less than successful Spa outing for our German driver, Mr Coulthard says he knows how Sebastian might be feeling following his crash in Belgium...
When I began my Formula One career in 1994 I competed in eight races and barely put a foot wrong. Everyone wrote nice things about me.
Naively, I supposed the journalists were all my friends and my pride was puffed up. Then came 1995 and a period in which I managed to take five consecutive poles, only converting at the fifth attempt. I spun twice on the way to the grid in Germany and had to return to the pits to get the spare car; I spun on the installation lap at Monza and the race started without me; in Adelaide I crashed into the pit-wall under no pressure from my team mate. Everyone wrote nasty things about me.
Naively, I supposed that the journalists all hated me. I remember an Autocourse compilation of the top-10 drivers of the year in which one of the most respected F1 reporters at that time wrote “David has an amazing ability to talk as if he hasn’t been at the wheel of the car”. The inference was that I wasn’t prepared to take responsibility for my mistakes. I couldn’t believe what I was reading.
The reason I recall this is because it took me a while to realise that this is a battle you can’t win. There was never any personal animus against me. There were only stories. Formula One is a media-driven sport and journalists have a duty to report the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. That is something Sebastian Vettel will do well to keep in mind now that the knives seem to be out for him.
Sebastian is an unbelievably quick and talented driver. At 23 years of age, he has shown he can win races. And in some style too. I don’t think there are many in the paddock who believe he will never win a world title. He may still win it this year. Where he is badly lacking, in comparison with the four other guys in the championship fight, is in terms of his experience. Vettel has 50-odd grands prix to his name. Jenson Button is a world champion with 180-odd races under his belt; Fernando Alonso is a double world champion with over 150 grands prix behind him; Mark Webber has a decade’s worth more experience than his young German team mate. The only title rival with a comparable race tally is Lewis Hamilton, but he arrived ready to go, having been groomed at McLaren since the age of 12. He arrived from GP2 and did not have to move from team to team learning the ropes. Sebastian moved from BMW-Sauber to Toro Rosso (where he became the sport’s youngest ever race winner) and is now in his second season at Red Bull where he is in title contention for a second year running.
I want to make it clear I am not trying to excuse Sebastian’s recent high-profile errors. He reacted poorly in Turkey after his collision with Mark. He made a silly mistake in Hungary when he fell too far behind the safety car. And he was clearly at fault in Belgium last weekend when he shunted Jenson Button out of the race. He lost control. All of a sudden people are asking whether Sebastian has lost the plot; whether the pressure of being in this position is beginning to tell. Martin Whitmarsh fanned the flames with his post-race comments describing Sebastian as a “crash kid” and calling the drive-through penalty “lenient”. Martin, of course, has a vested interest in ratcheting up the pressure on his rivals, not to mention building up his own drivers.
Personally I don’t think it is about pressure. The cock-pit is a driver’s natural environment and when I was racing I never felt as if I was under pressure. Pressure comes when you feel you have lost control of a situation and from watching Sebastian at very close quarters I don’t see that. I see a young man who is suffering from his first spell of growing pains. He is trying to stay calm and focused. He is trying not to let the criticism affect him, just as he didn’t let the praise go to his head. When he looks back at Spa he will realise that he didn’t need to pass Jenson at that point. He had the faster car and it would have come to him eventually. But you only have to look at what happened to Fernando to realise that anyone can make mistakes in those conditions.
The bottom line is Sebastian is a seriously quick driver who has made a few costly mistakes through lack of experience. I am not excusing them – as I have said before, F1 is no feeder school – I’m just saying they are understandable."
This first appeared in the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph which DC writes a column for on the Tueasday after each race.
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