Villeneuve mocks Vettel for looming title defeat

Former driver and outspoken individual, Jacques Villeneuve, has seemingly mocked Sebastian Vettel after the German’s title bid with Ferrari went up in smoke when he clashed with Verstappen at Japan.

The Canadian believed that Vettel should not have attempted to pass from that far behind. “He was too far behind when he overtook,” he told Sky Italia. “Max couldn’t just say ‘Please go past me’. Vettel tried something and didn’t play dirty, but it was too risky.”

And then came the sucker punch from the Canadian champion. “He could write a book about his season called ‘How to lose a world championship’,” said Villeneuve. He also went on to compare the two title rivals and pointed out a major difference.

“The key difference between him and Hamilton this year is that Lewis first thinks about the situation before making an aggressive attack,” he said. “Already at the last race we could see that he [Vettel] has accepted he cannot win.”

“You can see that he [Hamilton] is more relaxed already.”

Vettel blamed Verstappen for their incident, claiming that the Dutchman should have left him more room. However, this is just the latest in a long line of mistakes by both him and Ferrari and Villeneuve admitted that it was tough to comprehend how they messed up.

“It’s not easy to understand Ferrari, and not just because they lost some races. After some mistakes they never returned to the right path,” said Villeneuve. “It is impossible to understand from the outside.”

Vettel is known to be an aggressive driver but, as seen many times in this season, he has the tendency to lose his head at crucial moments. It is what differentiates Hamilton from him and is primarily the reason why he sits 67 points adrift of the Brit.

Villeneuve, for all his explosive criticisms, does have a point this time around. The German has made far too many mistakes to win a world championship and it looks as if he might have to be content with trying next year.