since i’m listening to milky chance 24/7 i was thinking too much about seb and kimi singing «sweet sun»
kimi only sings this part ‘cause the meaning fits seb perfectly and ofc kimi’s voice is something you’d never expect in a song but i love to think that he asked seb to give him a part…….he wanted to sing about him
Sebastian Vettel and Jonathan Wheatley celebrate after securing the drivers championship, 2013.
Photo by Charles Coates/LAT Images (edited)
Max Verstappen and Jonathan Wheatley celebrate after securing the drivers championship, 2022.
Photo by Zak Mauger/LAT Images (edited)
Sebastian Vettel Interview with NRC 🇳🇱 [2025-03-23]
English Translation ↴
Sebastian Vettel felt guilty. It was the end of 2020 and he had accurately calculated his carbon output from a season of Formula 1. The conclusion: his footprint was equivalent to that of 40 people.
“I came out to about 400 tons per year. An average person emits about 10 tons, and that's already a problem.”
Vettel, 37, sits in his office in a picturesque northern Swiss village in mid-February. What the village is called, Vettel does not want the newspaper to know because of privacy concerns. From behind his desk, the four-time world champion looks out on snow-covered hills and Lake Constance, which flows into the Rhine nearby. Across the way lies his native Germany.
Half an hour earlier, Vettel arrived in his electric Porsche from his farm, where he lives with his wife and three children. After his F1 retirement in late 2022, he rarely gives interviews. But he does agree to a request from NRC to talk about the unusual transformation he has gone through: he was a Formula One driver, and is now committed to climate change.
As a racing driver, are you credible when you speak out about climate?“People can decide that for themselves. Am I a hypocrite? Yes. Are we all hypocrites? Probably. Is it about not being a hypocrite? Then you should have no footprint at all. That's not doable for myself, nor for virtually all 8 billion other people.”
Somewhere on the bottom shelf of a cabinet in Vettel's office is a figurine shaped like the nose of an F1 car, with an engraved plaque on it: Sebastian Vettel, jüngster Weltmeister. Vettel was 23 when he first became F1 champion in 2010, as the youngest driver ever - a record that still stands. He drove, like Max Verstappen now, at Red Bull Racing, and immediately won another three world titles for that team. In 2015 he left for Ferrari, to bid farewell to Formula 1 at the end of 2022 after two years with Aston Martin. Vettel won 53 races, the fourth highest number in F1 history.
Vettel stood out for more than his performance, in the sport dominated by commercial interests where, apart from Lewis Hamilton, virtually no one touches on social issues. In the final years of his F1 career, Vettel increasingly spoke out publicly about injustices, such as discrimination against LGBTQ. But most of all, he talked about the environment and climate.
He also took action. For example, he gave guest lectures on sustainability to schoolchildren and went into the stands after the British Grand Prix to clean up trash left behind. When Formula One first raced in Miami, he wore a T-shirt warning that that city would be under water in a while. He also offered the shirt for sale in his Web shop; proceeds went to environmental organization Sea Shepherd. Vettel, who earned tens of millions of euros a year in his heyday, also invested in the Swiss company Climeworks, which puts up factories that remove CO2 from the air.
At the beginning of his career, Vettel knew somewhere that there was a problem. Sometimes things struck him, like when he saw firsthand the deforestation in that country around an F1 race in Malaysia. But he didn't think more deeply about it yet: he was young, the future seemed endlessly distant and racing swallowed up all his attention.
The birth of his oldest daughter, in 2014, sparked a turnaround.
“Then suddenly you hold the future in your arms. You think: I have to protect this baby. That's when I started to worry. So I started looking into it and looking for a solution. I was in Formula 1, numbers and data everywhere. If the car isn't fast enough, you fix that.”
But addressing climate change is different than making an F1 car three tenths of a second faster, he soon realized. “My first emotion then was: dejection, and a kind of climate anxiety.”
Do you still have that?“Less so. I have much more hope now, after talking to experts and reading up on things. There are many solutions to the problem. We have solar panels, wind power and hydropower. Synthetic fuels for in your car. But the problem is that we still don't feel the urgency enough.”
At the time, did you ever consider stopping racing right away?“Yes. But if I continued, I could make my voice heard more clearly. I did think: I should quit today, and go live in the woods and survive with what I can find there. That's just not going to work. We can't go back. We can fly less, take bicycles instead of cars. Great, I'm all for it. But for the big picture, a lot more is needed.”
Because of that big footprint, would it have been better if you had never become a racing driver? Or do you feel that being able to campaign publicly now outweighs that?“I don't know. If I hadn't raced, someone else would have been in my seat. I want to be modest, but I think I did reach people with my actions and projects. Although there are also plenty who say: it's a hoax. You're a hypocrite, get back in the car and shut up. Fine. Maybe they are afraid of the same things I am, but just express it differently.”
When it dawned on him that he himself was also part of the climate problem, Vettel started “slightly obsessively” keeping track of everything. “Which flights did I take? What rides did I take to the airport, from the hotel to the track? In what kind of car? From what year of manufacture?”
That's how he ended up with 400 tons. “Then you think: you really are a problem for the planet. Then I changed course. I looked at what was worst on my list. I was still flying in private jets then. Was that really necessary? Or could I just get on a scheduled flight with 150 others? Yes, so I stopped private flights altogether. And when I could, I went to races by car. Belgium, Spain. Sometimes also by train. To Italy, for example, when I drove for Ferrari. I said: I take the train, to which they responded: you are a Ferrari driver. Ferrari drivers don't come by train. But I can be stubborn. Long story short: that's how I got my footprint down to 60 tons."
“But of course I was in a privileged position. I made a lot of money, could stop whenever I wanted. Had all the choices. It doesn't work if you start pointing your finger at people who toil very hard to make ends meet and saying, how dare you fly to Thailand? I don't believe in that culture of blaming each other. It's also never going to work to explain to people that they have to give things up.”
Do we have to give things up?“We will have to change. That's what's different. We have to become aware of the problem and understand it. I gave up fast and comfortable travel because I was aware that we have a problem. That's why awareness is so important. But that doesn't mean we should dictate people's choices.”
Does it worry you that that awareness is difficult as more and more people vote for political parties that deny the problem?“Yes. We've made so much progress, and it feels like it's stalled now. That's a danger, and I don't know the answer to it either. All those screamers who shout: follow me, I have the solution, don't let any more foreigners in. Ultimately, I think that comes from insecurity. Yes, we want strong leaders in politics, but we also want leaders who are vulnerable and admit that mistakes have been made."
“I think the younger generation is much more open to that. To give an example, when I raced, we competed super hard on the track. Outside the car you didn't talk to the other person, because that was your enemy. Now they race just as hard against each other, but they go party together the next night.”
"We've made so much progress, and it feels like it's stalled now. That's a danger, and I don't know the answer to it either.”
Now that Vettel no longer drives in Formula One, his life looks a lot quieter. Very occasionally he still shows up in the paddock at a Grand Prix, always to draw attention to a problem he considers important. In 2023, for example, he appeared at the race in Japan because he had eleven insect hotels erected next to the circuit, which he had helped build himself. At the Grand Prix in Saudi Arabia in April, he will host a race for women event.
But otherwise, Vettel is mostly occupied with his family and has far fewer commitments than during his career, when almost every day was filled with racing, training and promotional activities. He no longer races, does not come to his office nearly every day and does not do any other regular work.
After you announced your farewell, you said you were a little afraid of life after Formula One. Is it as scary as you thought it would be?*Laughs* “Well, I don't wake up screaming. But I made a conscious decision not to have anything in my schedule at all, and that is a challenge. The lack of structure. For as long as I can remember, I was always racing. You're still working on things after the season until Christmas, then you have a few weeks of vacation and from January everything starts again. Every year is the same. And besides that, I was used to getting confirmation every two weeks on how I was doing. You drive your lap time, and you know right away how good you are. But of course my wife doesn't give me a printout in the morning saying I was a good husband yesterday."
“I miss racing, but that's more about the competition, the challenge, than the pure driving. I think I've always been a little different, in the sense that I didn't identify as a driver as much as others. When people asked me what I did, I never just said: I drive Formula 1. Maybe I was a bit insecure, I didn't want to brag.”
Vettel can regularly be found in the clay these days: he is completing a one-year agricultural course next summer. “Since the pandemic I am very interested in agriculture, also because of the link between agriculture and climate. Not just of: I like vegetables and I want to grow them myself, but really the Formula 1 approach. There you're always looking for the last bit of performance from your car. Of course, I'm not looking for the last bit of performance from a potato, but I do want to know what the difference is between conventional and organic cultivation.”
Are you going to make that your job?“No, I don't see myself doing that full-time. But I enjoy that it's work that literally puts both feet on the ground. You learn patience, because you really do have to wait for the vegetables to grow. When you work with animals, you don't control everything. I think there are important values in such work, which I would like to pass on to my children.”
He occasionally gives demonstrations in old F1 cars, which he fills up with alternative, more sustainable fuel. This is made using green energy from biomass, as well as CO2 taken from the atmosphere. CO2 emissions are 80 percent lower than regular fuel, but the price is still about three times higher. Starting in 2026, Formula 1 will switch to similar sustainable fuels - and, in addition, half of its cars will be electrically powered.
“Formula 1 has a lot of potential,” he says. “With all the money going into it, the sport can really change. The fact that synthetic fuel is coming next year is a very good step.”
Although F1 is the sport pre-eminently labeled “polluting,” the footprint of Vettel's former biotope is smaller than that of, say, the World Cup. Formula One emitted the equivalent of 223,000 tons of CO2 in 2022, according to a sustainability brief released by the sport last year. FIFA estimated emissions from the World Cup in Qatar that same year were 16 times higher. Race car emissions are negligible - less than 1 percent of Formula One's total emissions. The real climate impact is in the logistics of the championship, with 24 races annually on five continents.
“At the end of the day, it's also not about cars driving around in circles,” says Vettel, ”but about all that travel around the world. Team members going to races. Parts being sent back and forth. The dog-thousands of fans coming to Zandvoort, Monza and Melbourne. How do they get around? Where does their trash go? How will such a race be powered? There are still many challenges there.”
Can all that be done in a sustainable way at all?“It will have to. And that applies not only to Formula 1, but also, for example, to all the concerts that take place week in, week out. We have to learn to think more circularly. Formula 1 can be an excellent example in this regard. It's not the first sport you think of when it comes to sustainability. But it is a global sport that can show people that change is possible.”
The goal of no more than 1.5 degrees of warming from the Paris climate agreement is virtually unachievable. Shouldn't we just ban Formula 1 then?“Fair question. I love this sport, I grew up with it. So very selfishly: it would be a shame if I could no longer watch it in the future. But much more importantly, what about all those kids who now look up to drivers, like I once looked up to Michael [Schumacher]? Who dream of becoming drivers too. Should we crush that dream? I don't think so.”
