Sebastian Vettel was a distraught man after the title race came to an end in Mexico last night, with Hamilton winning his 5th title after claiming P4 in the grand prix yesterday.
Vettel gave the F1 fraternity a wonderful moment last night, when he left his post race interview midway and went up to Lewis to congratulate him on his wonderful season this time round.
The 4 time champion then also went into the Mercedes garage to congratulate the Mercedes engineers and also embraced Toto Wolff.
Now, while Vettel’s gesture was immensely classy, especially when he immediately went into congratulate Hamilton after the race.
But he had dodged an important question while doing so, as David Coulthard had asked him about the exact moment when he thought he had lost the championship.
Now, after everything had settled down, Vettel did explain the moment that he felt he lost the championship, and while Germany and Monza could have been highlighted as moments when Vettel had let the title slip, but for Vettel, it was Singapore.
The Ferrari man conceded that it was only in Singapore that he realistically felt he had lost the title.
“None of the two(Hockenheim or Monza), to be honest. For me it was more Singapore.” Vettel said.
“From Singapore onwards we just didn’t have the pace to keep up with Mercedes for a couple of races. And then obviously some other things happened on top that didn’t help and we couldn’t score the points due to mistakes that we did, mistakes that I did.
“I can’t be too hard on myself with what happened in Germany because it’s not like… I’ve done much bigger mistakes this year but obviously it was the most costly one.
“Unfortunately it’s part of racing: when you push you might be sometimes pushing a little bit too hard. I chose the wrong corner as well.
“But anyway, it’s behind me and I’m not really thinking about that too much. I consider it part of racing and it happens to others as well.
“Seeing that [we] struggled in the last couple of weeks, just for pace and speed, was probably more defining than that.” he concluded.
What do you think was the biggest turning point of the season? Yes, Vettel did make a few glaring errors but with a quicker car for a large part of the season, should Ferrari have done better with strategy, in order to help Vettel compete more in the title race?
