Having spent seven seasons racing for Force India/Racing Point, Mexican ace Sergio Perez is leaving the team to make room for no other than Sebastian Vettel, a four-time world champion who spent his last five years at Scuderia Ferrari. In 2021, Racing Point will continue as the Aston Martin F1 Team following billionaire Lawrence Stroll’s investment in the company, whose son Lance Stroll has been at Racing Point since 2019.
Sebastian Vettel won a single race for Ferrari in 2019, currently standing at 13th place this season after eight races. Having shown that he is struggling to work with the Italian team, the Scuderia announced the German’s departure after this season back in May. Currently, Vettel’s young teammate Charles Leclerc stands at seventh in the championship.
A different outfit and team for Vettel in 2021.
This season, Racing Point has lost $473,000 and 15 championship points due to its RP20 car being too much of a copy of 2019’s championship-winning Mercedes AMG F1 W10 EQ Power+-a resemblance that was noticed by the Renault F1 Team and reported to the FIA.
Racing Point turning into the Aston Martin F1 Team for 2021 is interesting because from 2016 until the end of this season, the British carmaker was the main sponsor of Red Bull Racing, the team that helped Vettel to all his four championship wins before.
However, with Canadian Lawrence Stroll investing heavily in the troubled brand and thus becoming its executive chairman, former CEO Andy Palmer was quickly replaced by former AMG chief Tobias Moers. The partnership with Red Bull and chief technical officer Adrian Newey is also set to end this year, despite Newey’s Aston Martin Valkyrie hypercar still being under development. Stroll owns the Racing Point F1 Team, and just made sure to secure Sebastian Vettel as his son’s teammate.
Now, instead of Newey, it will be Racing Point technical director Andrew Green’s job to see how much Mercedes tech they can use to push the Aston Martin brand comfortably ahead of Scuderia Ferrari in F1. Aston is still planning to launch a trio of mid-engine supercars to fight Ferrari on the road as well. What’s next will be mostly up to this guy below.
Lawrence Stroll
Vettel will, no doubt, leave Maranello empty-handed, not having accomplished nearly as much as he dreamed-much like his predecessor Fernando Alonso.