ANZ_TF110 wrote:Vettel scored Torro Rosso (Minardi) only Pole and win so he is a talent, but to me Aytron is the best out their. He beat his teammate to pole in the 1988 Monaco GP Alain Prost who is a great driver by over a second and they were one and two!!!
Back home for a day, so I'll chip in with my $0.02 before I'm off again.
The thing is, the Toro Rosso car was actually fairly good at the end of the 2008 season, looking back at it - Vettel was at least on a par with, and sometimes ahead of, the main works outfit in the final five races. Take the 2008 Brazilian GP for example - whilst Vettel qualified in 7th place, Bourdais was in 9th, and whilst his Q2 time was about 0.2s off Vettel's, Bourdais was also 0.2s ahead of Webber in the works outfit (I'm ignoring Q3 because of the effects of race fuel qualifying, where Bourdais was put on a very heavy fuel load). During the race, Bourdais was running in 7th at one point, but a collision in Turn 1 when Trulli went up the inside of Bourdais pushed Bourdais off the road, damaging the floor of his car and costing him six places on the road.
At the previous race in China, Vettel's Q2 time was only a tenth ahead of Bourdais (but again Bourdais was put on a significantly heavier starting fuel load, so he started 10th whilst Vettel was in 8th), and Bourdais actually finished ahead of Vettel on the road in Japan, by five seconds and what would have been 6th place, but was (in my mind wrongly, but that is a separate matter) penalised for the collision between him and Massa and demoted to 10th.
And as for Monza, even there we can point out a few caveats - Bourdais, after all, qualified in 4th place, and Toro Rosso reckoned, based on his lap times, that had he not stalled on the grid that they could have managed his pit stops so he came out ahead of Kovalainen and finished behind Vettel.
So, although Vettel did do well in the end part of the 2008 season, and scored several times whilst Bourdais failed to, Bourdais did show enough pace at times to suggest that that Vettel's rise up the grid was not without the help of the Red Bull design team and the development drive of Ferrari (they are rumoured to have squeezed as much as 30bhp more out of their engine, which also went to Toro Rosso, over the course of the season, even with restricted development, such was their desire to beat Mclaren and Hamilton).
Jeroen Krautmeir wrote:Absolute nonsense.For me, it's absolute impossible to compare Senna to Vettel. In fact, you can't compare anyone from that era to this era, as the cars are simply so different. I didn't mind the guys at Red Bull and Toro Rosso, but I just want all of them hanged, now...
Ascanelli should know better. Ever thought of putting Sebastian in a 1988 McLaren and telling him to do or die on the first lap?
(I'm just a bit tired right now, so I could just be exaggerating)
Personally, I have to disagree with Ascanelli's judgement, even allowing for some of the complexities which arise from comparing the respective cars. At the moment, Vettel has shown that he can be blisteringly quick, especially over a single lap in qualifying but also during race conditions, which, in some respects, replicates what Senna was also capable of doing.
However, and this is crucial, Senna was about so much more than raw speed. Senna also had many other noted qualities - for example, his fastidious attention to detail, and to technical feedback, almost to the point of obsessing about it. He wanted to know about every last nut and bolt on his car; Coulthard notes that when he first tested a car for Williams, Senna, who was supposed to be doing fitness training, instead came to the track. For the rest of the day, Senna watched Coulthard on track, observed his telemetry and listened to what he said to the race engineers over the radio and in the briefing sessions. Why? Because he wanted to know how good a test driver he was so he could trust his judgement (and he did trust Coulthard) when pushing forward development of the car.
That is not to say that Vettel is useless at feedback - but at no point has anybody ever said that Vettel is good at car development, or praised him for the work he does outside of the cockpit and with the engineers. Compare that to Barrichello, who has won a lot of praise over the years from Ross Brawn and recently Sir Frank Williams - not easy men to please - for the quality of his feedback. And love him or loathe him (and there are many here who favour the latter), Alonso again is respected for the quality of his feedback.
Furthermore, Vettel has had, if we are honest, by far and away the fastest car over the course of the year, and despite the flawless way in which he drove in Abu Dhabi to take the title, there were several races this year where he threw away fistfuls of points for silly reasons (Spa Francorchamps, for example). Some of that was due to Red Bull's inexperience as a major team, but Vettel was equally capable of making mistakes on his own.
And that leads me onto another issue - the way that both drivers would behave around other drivers. One thing that Vettel has been criticized for has been the way he treats other drivers, and there have been a few unflattering comparisons with Schumacher's aggressive moves in years past. For example, many felt that he was far too aggressive against Webber in the British GP, where he cut across so sharply to try and squeeze Mark against the wall that it ended up hurting his own start and let Webber through. In Germany, he qualified on pole but ended up in 3rd because his overly aggressive defence against Alonso put him so far off line that Massa drove right round him into Turn 1, and compromised Vettel's own line so badly that Alonso squeezed through as well. Senna, too was no angel, but what was better about his moves was that his aggression was more measured, it could be argued.
To be blunt, whilst Vettel has driven very well at times throughout this year, if you had put either Alonso or Hamilton into the same car, I suspect that they would equally have been capable of taking the title this year, and perhaps done better. On a more personal and subjective level, I don't think that Vettel was the best driver this season in terms when considering overall race craft - in my mind, Kubica was the better driver, because he has had the 5th fastest car, generally, yet managed to score some very unexpected podiums and even compete for wins (Monaco, for example, and Spa Francorchamps).
Vettel is quick, there is no doubt about that - but at the moment, he just doesn't strike me as having the same overall depth of race craft and ability outside of the team that drivers like Senna or Prost had. Drivers like Senna and Prost could win races, and indeed championships, with technically inferior cars but superior race craft - but, for the moment, whether Vettel would have been able to compete for an entire championship if he had had a car that was only as competitive as the F10 or MP4-25 is still not entirely settled in my mind.
