Motorsport — Blog — Healy Chen

Vettel will leave Ferrari

The 2020 Formula One season has yet to turn a single wheel in anger - thanks to the coronavirus - and we are already knee-deep in the ‘silly season’. Yesterday the bombshell dropped that four-time World Champion Sebastian Vettel will not renew his contract with Ferrari after the 2020 season; today, the official Scuderia Ferrari twitter account confirmed the news. Lots of cliches can be thrown around, but indeed it marks the end of an era at the famous Italian team, with Ferrari firmly placing their future hopes and aspirations on young Charles LeClerc.

Such is the cruel fate of the sporting world: the young upstart replacing the aged veteran, no matter how many trophies rest on the mantle of the latter.

If Vettel fails to capture the world title this season, it will mark his tenure with Ferrari as somewhat of a disappointment. So much fanfare was made when he made the jump to the Scuderia from Red Bull, bringing with him four consecutive driver championships, and the legacy of one Michael Schumacher, Vettel’s racing idol, whose success with the Maranello squad is stuff of legends. With just over a dozen victories and zero championships in the past four years, the promise brought on by Vettel’s arrival in Italy has yet to be fulfilled.

For sure, the utter dominance of team Mercedes during this current turbo-hybrid era means that the promise of many other drivers and teams throughout the grid were for naught as well. However, Ferrari produced a competitive car in the 2017 and 2018 seasons, but Vettel simply could not deliver. This older Vettel have shown a vulnerability in not reacting well to pressure, famously crashing into wall at the 2018 German Grand Prix, the turning point of his championship battle with Lewis Hamilton. Unlike the young phenom that won four titles with Red Bull, we did not see the same fight in recent seasons from Vettel.

And now his seat at the Scuderia will be vacant after the 2020 season; the drivers musical chairs have begun in earnest. Who will be lucky person to step into such a hallowed seat? Will it be Lewis Hamilton, whose own contract with Mercedes is expiring at the end of the year as well. At which team will Vettel land? A prodigal return to the Red Bull team, perhaps? If Bernie was still in charge of F1, I’d bet he would engineer a move for Vettel to team with Hamilton at Mercedes - it will elevate interest and ratings of F1 instantly, something direly needed right now with the sport suffering from the shutdown affects of COVID-19.

The rise of racing games

With the coronavirus going on all around us, there’s obviously no professional sports happening at the moment. The main source of entertainment and escape for plenty of people, it’s rather cruel that there aren’t any sports to watch during this banishment to the confines of our homes. I get it: the reason we have to shelter in place is the same reason there aren’t any major league baseball games happening right now. It doesn’t diminish how much I am missing sports, and surely I’m one amongst many.

One discipline that seems to have embraced the situation quite well is that of motorsports. It’s uniquely able to adapt to the world of gaming, the simulation of which offers a convincing translation that it suffices to keep us entertained. Unlike a basketball video game where you don’t physically toss around a ball to play, a car in a racing game can be controlled with a wheel and pedal set-up, offering a decent enough facsimile that pro racers actually use them for training. The more extravagant setups can even offer some modicum of motion and g-force simulation, though those are prohibitively expensive for mere mortals like me who don’t have million-dollar contracts.

But I have been playing racing games with a wheel and pedal (shoutout to Logitech) since the days of Gran Turismo 4 in the early 2000s, and it’s deeply satisfying for me to see how much the “real-life” motorsport community have embraced driving simulators like a Gran Turismo or iRacing during this coronavirus episode. There’s still lots of racing happening on the weekends, just all in the virtual world. Honestly I’m quite thankful for it because it helps to break up the utter monotony of every day being exactly the same as the last.

Of course, I’m eager for real racing to return to real race tracks. There’s no replicating the sights and sounds of drivers man-handling actual cars through a corner, displaying acts of athleticism most of us can barely imagine. I’d also like to go outside and attend races, and indeed there’s no more intoxicating smell than the burning of petrol (sorry, Formula E).

In the meantime, I’m glad we have a pretty good substitute.