Inside the gamble that made Red Bull winners: Neil Martin on Vettel’s sodden Shanghai coup
Before Red Bull became the juggernaut hoovering up wins and titles, there was a day in Shanghai when they rolled the dice like a team with nothing to lose and everything to gain. Sebastian Vettel crossed the line for the outfit’s first-ever Formula 1 victory at the 2009 Chinese Grand Prix; behind that result, as former chief strategist Neil Martin tells it, was a call rooted in cold numbers and a feel for the race few others had.
It’s easy to forget how raw Red Bull still were then. Today they’re a benchmark, Verstappen’s win at Monza ticked their 125th in F1, and their trophy cabinets bulge with Constructors’ and Drivers’ crowns. Back in April ’09, they were the upstarts with a fast car, a sharp pit wall and a wet Sunday that played to their nerve.
Vettel had already done the improbable in qualifying: one flying lap in each session thanks to a driveshaft issue, one shot each time, and still he nailed pole. Mark Webber backed him up in third. The weather did the rest.
The first eight laps ran behind the Safety Car in heavy rain. In the refuelling era, that created a split-second chess match. Most of the field dived for fuel top-ups to go long once the race went green. Red Bull didn’t. That, Martin says, was the whole ballgame.
“Superficially, Red Bull had never won a race, so seeing the opportunity to take a different route and win was obviously very appealing and didn’t have much downside,” Martin recalls. “That’s something called asymmetric risk – there’s a lot of upside but not much downside. We were expected to lose.”
The upside wasn’t just track position. It was physics. Cars in clean air could see, and cars in the pack couldn’t. “What those teams had missed was the effect due to spray and visibility,” Martin says. “Being at the front you had no spray and the separation between the cars going full speed, our analysis showed, was about two seconds. So if you pitted and went to the back with 20 cars, you’d given away 40 seconds in race time.”
Do the math. Stay out, run short, and if the driver can pull chunks of time in clear air while everyone else squints through a grey wall, you leapfrog them when the stops play out. “We thought: actually, if we’re in the lead for four or five seconds, pulling away in clear air, not being in the spray plus the separations, we’re going to catapult ourselves up the order,” Martin says. “That’s exactly what we did.”
Once the Safety Car peeled in, Vettel went. He punched a 13-second lead over Jenson Button in just seven racing laps, then pitted and rejoined third. When Button and Rubens Barrichello eventually boxed behind another Safety Car, the RB5 was back in clean air. From there it was control and composure in treacherous conditions. Webber made it a 1–2; Button trailed in a distant third.
It wasn’t without nerves. Vettel admitted the aquaplaning was vicious, particularly through the long final corner, and his “worst moment” came when a misread and a wall of spray led to contact with Sebastien Buemi. But the car survived, the pace didn’t drop, and the team’s late-night reliability scramble held.
“To get pole and take the first win for Red Bull, having done it for Toro Rosso at Monza last year, feels special,” Vettel said after. “We were very concerned about reliability… when you only have one lap there’s no second chance, so it was really a bit unbelievable that we made pole.”
On the race, he added: “Mark and I were both on the short strategy, so when the Safety Car went in we had to push to get away from the pack, but it was tricky. I had the best of the conditions as I had no cars running in front of me for almost the whole race, but still it was really difficult with the aquaplaning.”
For all the romance of “first wins,” the Shanghai breakthrough reads now like a mission statement for the Red Bull era that followed. Aggressive without being reckless. Willing to trust data over orthodoxy. Absolutely ruthless about track position when conditions turn nasty.
Back then, refuelling opened windows modern F1 no longer offers, but the core lesson hasn’t aged: in the wet, clean air is king. The visibility penalty for those in the spray can still flip a grid on its head, and the most successful teams are the ones who spot the second-order effect before the rest of the pit lane.
The symbolism isn’t lost in 2025. Red Bull’s powerhouse is built on dozens of smart, timely calls since — across Vettel’s title run and into the Verstappen years — but the template was there in Shanghai. A young driver who could execute on the limit. A pit wall hunting for asymmetric gains. And a team that, even before the trophies piled up, already knew how to win.
