Sebastian Vettel on the season the fire dimmed: “2019 was the break year for me”
Sebastian Vettel spent a decade looking inevitable. Four straight titles with Red Bull from 2010 to 2013, a slew of records torn up, and that sense—so rare in Formula 1—that a race weekend would bend to his will. But even the iron-willed have inflection points. For Vettel, the moment he felt the edge start to soften wasn’t the end at Aston Martin. It wasn’t even the bruising Ferrari finale. It was earlier. Quietly. In 2019.
Speaking on F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast, the four-time World Champion drew a clear line between the version of himself that could rattle off peak laps at will and the all-round driver who could sustain championship-winning consistency.
“You have to distinguish between peak performances and then peak all around,” Vettel said. “I think you are probably able to deliver peak performances for a much longer time than the actual lasting peak performance or consistency.”
By his own measure, the raw speed arrived early. He points to 2008/09—the Toro Rosso fairytale at Monza, the first Red Bull steps—as the years he felt the purest pace. The completeness came later. “In 2010 I won the championship, but in 2011 I was much more ready to win it,” he added.
Ferrari was supposed to be the long game. The Schumacher echo. He won grands prix in red and twice took title fights to Mercedes in 2017 and 2018. Yet the miles started to feel heavier even as the stakes stayed high.
“I remember, actually, in 2018, I started the season and traveled to the first race. I really felt like I didn’t want to go,” Vettel admitted. “I wanted to go racing, for sure, but I didn’t want to travel. It’s like I couldn’t be bothered sitting a day in a plane again, and that was weird.”
He won the first two races of that season and the adrenaline temporarily drowned out the doubt. But the pivot came twelve months later. Ferrari’s 2019 campaign was a riddle: a quick car down the straights, an engine that had the paddock whispering, but little sense of collective forward motion.
“2019 was a strange year, because our car was okay, and our engine was really, really good,” Vettel said. “We struggled to just make progress as a team… especially the second part of the season. I really, really wanted to win the championship with Ferrari. I wanted it so bad, and it didn’t happen. 2019 was sort of the break year, I would say, for myself, because I started to feel like, ‘We’re not making it. We’re not good enough.’”
Across the garage, a fresh yardstick arrived. Charles Leclerc, all momentum and impatience, grabbed poles and wins and celebrated fifth places like stepping stones rather than compromises. It wasn’t the cause of Vettel’s fade, but it threw the contrast into sharp relief.
“Charles came in in 2019, and Charles had so much energy, a completely different time in his career,” Vettel said. “When we finished fifth and sixth… I was spoiled. I won four championships. I wanted to win. I wanted the biggest trophy. Charles… was over the moon with a fifth and sixth because of different stages of his career. I think that’s when I started to struggle a bit.”
There was also the pull beyond the paddock gates. The family goodbyes got harder. “Maybe it was also a time when the kids started to be old enough to phrase, ‘Daddy, don’t go,’” he said. “Before, I always had the looks from the dog when the suitcase was in front of the door. With kids, it was much, much harder.”
Then came 2020. The pandemic paused everything, including the endless churn that often keeps doubt at bay. Vettel didn’t hate the quiet. “We’re not racing. I get this fantastic break that I never had, and enjoy it so much with the family,” he said. “At the same time, becoming aware of the kids growing, of problems in the world… I’m reflecting then.”
By 2020’s delayed start, Ferrari had moved on. Aston Martin was a reset—part mission, part self-check. “With Aston Martin starting a new challenge, I think I was ultimately looking for this reassurance that I can still do this,” Vettel said. “Which sounds silly… This uncertainty or insecurity is something that we all have. All the drivers have it.”
If you watched closely over 2021 and 2022, you saw flashes: the old racecraft in traffic, the tidy wet-weather touch, the smart tyre calls. That was the point, he says—isolated peaks were still there, even if the week-in, week-out ceiling had slipped. “I think I did have peak performances, even at a later stage. But overall peak, probably not anymore.”
Those who’ve followed Vettel’s arc won’t be shocked by the candour. His dominance in the blown-diffuser era was a marriage of precision and a car concept that sang to his inputs. As the sport shifted and the personal calculus changed—young family, longer seasons, a grid getting younger and readier—he felt the cost-benefit tilt.
There’s no tease here of an encore. Vettel closed the book at the end of 2022 and, for all the inevitable silly-season links since, hasn’t given off even a flicker that he wants back in. The competitive itch never truly leaves a driver built like this; the need to feed it does.
“I didn’t have that really last ultimate push anymore,” he said of 2019 and 2020. It’s a rare thing in F1: a serial winner explaining, without fuss or self-pity, why the summit stopped feeling like home.
