Wilman’s favorite Top Gear F1 cameo? Vettel’s Newey-coached Mansell masterclass
Andy Wilman has sat through more celebrity laps and studio gags than he’d care to remember, but the former Top Gear executive producer still lights up when the name Sebastian Vettel comes up. Not for the four World Championships he stacked with Red Bull between 2010 and 2013 — that dominance was obvious — but for the day he tore the Top Gear studio apart with a pitch-perfect Nigel Mansell impression. And the punchline? Adrian Newey was his acting coach.
“Vettel was the funniest,” Wilman said on the Midweek F1 podcast, recalling the 2011 taping. “If you’ve ever seen the show, when he does his Nigel Mansell impersonation, it’s spellbinding. And Adrian Newey taught it to him… We were like, ‘Oh, he’s German. This is going to be a bit sh*t.’ And it was pitch perfect. He was so funny.”
Set the scene: Vettel arrives on Top Gear at full power, deep in his Red Bull pomp and casually redefining what “dominant” looks like in modern F1. He sits opposite Jeremy Clarkson, starts chatting about old war stories, and then drifts into a Brummie lilt so eerily Mansell you could almost see the moustache. The audience lost it.
Vettel explained the origin to Clarkson. Newey — the engineering mastermind behind those title-winning Red Bulls — had been regaling him with tales from Williams days. One in particular stuck: Mansell attacking Monza’s chicane quicker than Nelson Piquet, Patrick Head marching over to ask what on earth he was doing, and Mansell giving the most Nigel answer imaginable. Vettel, hands set at ten-to-two on an imaginary steering wheel, delivered the full routine. It felt like a sketch that had lived in the paddock for years and suddenly found its stage.
That’s what made it so good: a rare crossover between the craft and the characters. Newey, revered for the details no one else sees, evidently notices dialogue as keenly as downforce, and Vettel — sharp and mischievous — turned the engineer’s memory into entertainment. It’s the sort of off‑track chemistry that explained so much about that era: fast car, faster mind, and a team that wasn’t afraid to have some fun.
Vettel didn’t just tell stories that day. He also stuck his name up the “F1 Star in a Reasonably-Priced Car” leaderboard, hustling the Suzuki Liana to a 1:44.0 — good enough for fourth on the final chart. Daniel Ricciardo would eventually top that list, a neat bit of symmetry given he’d go on to become Vettel’s Red Bull teammate in 2014.
What lingers, though, isn’t the stopwatch. It’s the reminder that Vettel’s charm always ran alongside the silverware. For all the relentless precision of his title years, he was never just a metronomic winner. He was (and remains) a storyteller, a mimic, a paddock presence with a sly wink for the old legends and genuine affection for the sport’s history.
And Newey’s cameo from the shadows? That’s equally on brand. The man whose cars defined an era inadvertently coaching a world champion through a dead-on Mansell. Only in F1 do you get a technocrat serving as a dialect tutor and a four-time champion moonlighting as a comedian — and only on Top Gear did that alchemy play out with the kind of live-wire energy that makes people talk about it 14 years later.
It’s easy to reduce a dominant period to results and stats. But it was moments like this — a designer’s anecdote, a driver’s mimicry, a studio roaring with laughter — that told you just how loose and confident that Red Bull camp really was. They were winning. And they were having a hell of a time doing it.
