Sebastian Vettle’s Winning Secret …..

Just how is it that a single driver with less than five years in Formula One was able to dominate the field in such a devastating way in 2011, a field which includes drivers like Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso? It’s his brains 

Vettel’s dominant season is mostly explained by his intelligence, and the way he’s used it to adapt to the new Pirelli tires and the tricky Red Bull car.

Managing tires during qualifying and the race was a major component of the way he built up such a massive margin in the first half of the season.

It’s not only about being fast. Everyone who drives a Formula One car for a living is ludicrously fast. If you’d put any of the 24 drivers racing in Formula One in the RB7, he would probably get very close to Vettel’s pole position times within a few hours.

But can you think about your tires while you’re driving that one lap? Can you think about the entire car and pick up details about the way it behaves that can be used by the engineers as feedback to develop car? Can you do this in a race? Can you do it in a race where the pressure is on you to perform? Can you think about your fuel load while you’re doing that? Can you do it for an hour and a half? Can you do it in the rain? Can you do it on a track which is half wet, half dry? Can you do it on a day where you don’t particularly feel like doing anything? Can you do it every other weekend between March and November? Can you stay after the race and go over pages and pages of data for hours? Can you do it for years?

His brains were needed to get the most out of Adrian Newey’s Red Bull RB7, a car which the equally fast Mark Webber managed only three pole positions and one win with.

The intelligence of a Grand Prix driver is like the layers of an onion. The more he has, the more he’s able to adapt to the ever-changing conditions of Formula One to edge out those other guys whose driving talents are all within one percent of his. Have enough layers and his name is Juan Manuel Fangio, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna or Michael Schumacher. In a few years, we’ll see if anyone from the current generation has quite as many.