Sebastian Vettel returns to Interlagos with sketchpads, not set‑ups. The four-time world champion is back in the paddock this weekend pushing F1REST: Drawn Together, his crowd-sourced art project aimed at spotlighting Brazil’s threatened rainforests. The brief is charmingly simple: draw a tree. The ambition is not.
Vettel’s been here before, figuratively and literally. He walked away from Formula 1 at the end of 2022 to spend more time with his family and throw his weight behind environmental causes. Since then he’s turned Suzuka’s Turn 2 into a bee hotel, sat agri exams, co-owned Germany’s SailGP team and run Nigel Mansell’s 1992 Williams and Ayrton Senna’s 1993 Monaco winner on synthetic fuel. This latest chapter is less horsepower, more pencil power.
The German says last year’s trip to the Amazon — meeting Indigenous communities, seeing the scale and fragility of the forest firsthand — lit the fuse. Now he wants to make the message bigger by making it personal. One tree per person, thousands of sketches stitched into a global collage. Kids, fans, drivers, anyone. Many trees make a forest; many drawings can too.
You don’t have to twist arms when the artist-in-chief is Sebastian Vettel. His call pulled in the sport’s heaviest hitters. Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso all put pen to paper, joined by George Russell and Charles Leclerc among others. Mercedes gave a glimpse of the paddock’s arts-and-crafts hour:
Getting creative to bring the forest to life. On Thursday, George and Kimi got involved in Sebastian Vettel’s latest project: F①REST – Drawn Together. It aims to reconnect people and planet, turning thousands of individual tree drawings into a global collage.🌲
— Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team (@MercedesAMGF1)November 7, 2025
There’s a considered rhythm to Vettel’s campaigning. It’s visible, collaborative, and rooted in the sport’s own footprint. He knows the contradictions; he doesn’t pretend they don’t exist. Instead he’s chosen to make F1 a platform, not a punch bag, and it’s hard to argue with the reach when the current grid — and a chunk of the grandstands — are suddenly drawing spruces and saplings in the Interlagos hospitality suites.
The timing doesn’t hurt. Brazil has been the center of environmental conversation this week, from the Earthshot Prize festivities to the build-up toward COP30, the UN’s pivotal climate summit hosted in the country next year. Vettel’s post carried the line “There is still a race to win,” and it landed with the clarity of a pit board. He’s swapped tenths for trees, but he’s kept the racer’s urgency.
If you’re looking for cynicism, you can find it anywhere. If you’re looking for traction, this has some. The project scales precisely because it’s easy to join and hard to ignore. A thousand doodles from paddock and public turning into a living mosaic isn’t a policy, but it is a conversation starter — the kind that travels fast and wide in a sport that lives on speed and spectacle.
Vettel has never been a performative activist. He’s happier getting his hands dirty than preaching, and he’s savvy enough to bring big names along without making them props. That matters. When Verstappen, Hamilton and Alonso are elbow-to-elbow over paper like they’re debating apexes, you feel it. There’s a certain poetry to it, too: drivers who usually shave trees with millimetric precision are asked to draw them instead.
So, yes, he’s retired. No, he hasn’t gone quiet. Interlagos offers the usual drama on track, but Vettel’s staging a different kind in the paddock — pens up, heads down, a gentle rallying cry sketched in pencil lines. Many trees make a forest. Many voices make a movement. And Vettel, still very much Sebastian Vettel, is once again finding speed in the long game.
