Encyclopedia
DRIVERS: SEBASTIAN VETTEL
Name: Sebastian Vettel
Nationality: Germany
Date of birth: July 3, 1987 - Heppenheim, Germany
From the town of Heppenheim, between Darmstadt and Mannheim, Vettel grew up with his father - who was a carpenter - racing karts and in hillclimbs. When he was three his father gave him a small kart which Vettel raced around the garden. He was not allowed to compete until he was seven when he started racing Bambini Class karts and won his first victory at the Wittgenborn circuit, near Frankfurt that year. In 1997 he joined TonyKart importer Peter Kaiser's KSN team and stayed with the team for the next few years, winning various regional and national titles and landing support from Red Bull. His big break came in 2001 when he was German Junior Champion and won the European Championship with the TonyKart factory team. At 15, with the help of Red Bull, he switched to Formula BMW with the Eifelland team and won five races, finishing runner up to Maximilian Gotz. He then switched to Gotz's ADAC Berlin-Brandenburg team in 2004 and won the title with 18 wins in 20 races. He then joined Mucke Motorsport in the Formula 3 Euroseries but failed to win a race although he fiinished fifth in the series. For Macau he switched to ASM and finished third. At the end of the year he hade his first test with BMW Williams, as part of his prize for winning the FBMW title. In 2006 he joined ASM, taking over from the previous champion Lewis Hamilton and he won four races but was beaten to the title by his team-mate Paul di Resta. He also took part in several Renault World Series events and won one of them but nearly lost a finger at Spa when he was hit by flying wreckage. Despite this he was back in action within a week. In Turkey he became BMW's third driver after Robert Kubica was promoted to replace Jacques Villeneuve.
The 2007 season saw him and competing in the Renault World Series but when Kubica had a big accident in Canada, the team turned to Vettel to race in the US Grand Prix at Indianapolis and became the youngest driver ever to score a point in F1 with eighth place. Within a few weeks he had been signed by Scuderia Toro Rosso to replace Scott Speed and at the end of the year he finished fourth in China in dreadful weather conditions. He stayed with the team in 2008 and in Monza stunned the F1 community by taking pole and winning the race, becoming the youngest F1 race winner by nearly a year. He ended the season eighth in the World Championship. He was signed to drive for the Red Bull Racing team in 2009.
