As Yoda once said anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering and it seems Sebastian Vettel is suffering a lot right now. Having enjoyed a stellar racing career seemingly not so long ago Vettel and therefore Ferrari remain winless so far this season. When he entered Formula full time in 2007 He showed speed guile, intelligence and the ability to win in a car that shouldn’t be capable of wining. That car was the Toro Rosso and his first win was at the 2008 Italian Grand Prix. Vettel was soon promoted to the Red Bull team in 2009 and from 2010 onward won multiple races and 4 championships in a row. After deciding he had done all he could with Red Bull Ferrari beckoned in 2015. As a child Vettel had watched his childhood hero Michael Schumacher win a string of championships for Ferrari. It was a move made on nostalgia and emotion. Ferrari was the new challenge and Vettel wanted to bring back the glory days in much the same way Schumacher did. His first season with the Scuderia reeled in 3 wins, against the odds in a Ferrari that was no match for the supremely dominant Mercedes F1 team. Surely 2016 would be the start of a championship campaign? It hasn’t turned out like that. While the 2016 Ferrari F1 car has the engine and handling it is still no match for team Mercedes F1. The Ferrari suffers from an inability to generate enough heat into the tyres during qualifying when under low fuel loads. This means it lacks outright speed over a single qualifying lap on fresh tyres, the downside being that Ferrari qualify lower down the grid when they should be higher up the order. Typically during a race Ferrari recovers enough to be able to match the Mercedes, the extra weight of the fuel load aids heat generation, but by then the chequered flag is being waved and a Mercedes takes yet another victory. To compound matters further Red Bull have overtaken Ferrari in the development race. Much to the evident frustration of Vettel who is desperate to win a race this year. https://youtu.be/N8pAPwU1fCc Mexico is where Vettel’s frustration came to a boil while battling with both Red Bulls. Towards the end of the race Vettel delivered an expletive laden radio message aimed at race director Charlie Whiting after Max Verstappen cut a corner, a penalty which went unpunished. As it turned out Verstappen was later punished Vettel handed third place, a step on the podium, the trophy and champagne accolades. Only later to be demoted himself after picking up a penalty for changing direction under braking while fending off a charging Ricciardo. Vettel’s frustration is real and it is to do more with Ferrari not producing a car that is capable of wining then it is to do with wheel to wheel racing. When he was at Red Bull Vettel became used to a rich diet of wins and championships it seemed like it would never end. The key architect to Vettel’s success at Red Bull was the design genius of Adrian Newey. When Schumacher was wining for Ferrari he had Ross Brawn and Rory Bryne. For now Vettel has to make do with a collective of individuals in a Ferrari team that lacks a star designer with a vision to be creative on the engineering side. Most corporations believe no one individual can make the difference anymore, design and engineering should be run as one entity to cut costs and speed up decision making. The disadvantage is that creativity is lost to bureaucracy. Radio communications reveal Vettel has started to question his engineers strategy during the race, at times appearing to mock the decision making process. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the team Principle, Maurizio Arrivabene, who issued what some consider to be kind of an ultimatum via a TV interview a few weeks ago. During the interview Arrivabene said that Vettel’s contract renewal is not guaranteed, something you should not be discussing live on TV, it should be done behind closed doors. This would have inflamed tensions for sure and it signals the start of a fractured relationship and quite possibly the beginning of the end of Vettel’s Ferrari tenure. There may well be a few other reasons why Vettel’s frustration exploded into anger as it did in Mexico but the biggest source may well be with Ferrari.