Sebastian Vettel considered quitting Formula One last year, the team principal at Red Bull, Christian Horner, revealed on Tuesday.
Vettel failed to win a race in 2014, finished fifth in the world championship and was regularly outclassed by the Red Bull rookie Daniel Ricciardo, who was third. The four-times world champion left the Milton Keynes team for Ferrari at the end of the season.
“Seb didn’t enjoy the regulation changes,” Horner said. “He didn’t enjoy the new engine, the feel from the new system, the power unit, the brake by wire, the lack of downforce. You could tell he wasn’t happy. He was preoccupied and to compound that his team-mate [Daniel Ricciardo] won three races. There was that feeling ‘am I enjoying this as much as I thought I was?’
“It was like someone had taken his toy away. It took him a while to get to grips with that. It was not something he was used to. He went through a period of disillusionment about the direction Formula One was going in. There was a stage last year when he thought whether he wanted to stop or not, whether he was getting the same level of enjoyment or not and whether or not he wanted to continue.”
Horner added: “He was just unhappy with the direction Formula One had gone. His previous four years had been so successful for him in a car he loved driving – and then suddenly things were very different. It raised some questions he had to deal with. He went back to basics and drove a kart in the middle of the year to get back to the bare essence of why he was a grand prix driver and rediscovered his passion for being a grand prix driver.”
Vettel went through similar emotions three years ago, the year of his third championship. “We saw a little bit of it at the start if 2012 when the regulations were changed about the exhaust-blown diffuser, Horner said. “At the beginning of that year he won in Bahrain but it took him to the flyaways at the end of the year to win his second race and it was only when we found some performance around the rear of the car that it opened up his envelope for him.”
There are no hard feelings regarding Vettel’s departure from Red Bull, with Horner feeling it was the right time for the 27-year-old to move on. “His boyhood hero was Michael [Schumacher] and of course there was the lure of Ferrari. For any driver – the brand, the history, the mystique, is immensely powerful,” Horner said. “And I think Sebastian felt the timing was right in his career. He needed that stimulus of a new challenge.”