Sebastian Vettel told his first Formula 1 win ended the McLaren career of 111-race driver

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Sebastian Vettel made history back in 2008 when he won his first Formula 1 race for several reasons.

The 2008 Italian Grand Prix was rain-affected and tested every driver to their limits, but Sebastian Vettel was a level above all of his rivals that weekend.

At the age of 21 years and 320 days, Vettel became the youngest driver ever to win a Formula 1 race, breaking Fernando Alonso’s previous record.

The young German also became the first driver to win a race for a Red Bull-backed team, unfortunately for the energy drink giant’s hierarchy, Vettel took the chequered flag racing for the junior Toro Rosso outfit.

Under all of its various guises since their inception at Minardi, the team have only won twice and both times were at Monza – Pierre Gasly’s only F1 victory in 2020 the other occasion.

The season was dominated by Lewis Hamilton at McLaren and Ferrari’s Felipe Massa, with Hamilton clinching the title by overtaking Timo Glock on the last lap of the final race of the season in Brazil.

By that point, the writing was already on the wall for his Finnish teammate Heikki Kovalainen.

While the Finn’s 111-race F1 career extended beyond that campaign, it was all over for him at McLaren after missing out on victory to Vettel at Monza.

Heikki Kovalainen’s McLaren career ‘decided’ by Sebastian Vettel’s first Formula 1 win

It was put to journalist Jon Noble on the Bring Back V10s Podcast that McLaren chief Martin Whitmarsh had defended Kovalainen after the race, saying he could have easily been on pole position had Vettel not been fuelled four laps lighter than him and that McLaren weren’t disappointed with the result.

However, responding to that, Noble said: “I think Whitmarsh is very good at broadcasting, [with his] smiley, happy, public image.

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“He’s not the sort of person who would come out in public and say, that was appalling. This is a disaster.

“But I think in private, I mean, I’ve always been on the perception that this was the race that ultimately decided Kovalainen’s future at McLaren because you can’t start on the front row at Monza with all your main rivals well down the order with the pace that car had clearly in Lewis’ hands and not win the race.

“I think this was perhaps the biggest image blow to Kovalainen in terms of where things went from then.”

Karun Chandhok explains what went wrong for Heikki Kovalainen at McLaren

Former driver turned pundit Karun Chandhok also appeared on his episode of the podcast and provided more details on Kovalainen’s demise, explaining: “Yeah, at the end of the day, McLaren were fighting for the Constructors World Championship.

“They were nip and tuck with Ferrari at the top, several points ahead of Toro Rosso.

“So logically, you’d expect a driver on the front row in a McLaren with clear visibility as well, would be there, but Heikki clearly didn’t have any confidence in the brakes and Monza is a circuit which puts a lot of emphasis on that.

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“You’ve got tremendous speeds, even in the wet, and if you haven’t got the confidence, if the discs are glazed and you haven’t got the bite of the retardation, then, I guess you can’t attack.

“This was the days before we had the harvesting and the regen and things like that. So it was pure braking performance.

“But even so, you would have thought, come on, you’re in a McLaren, you just must have enough outright downforce to win this thing.”

Who is Heikki Kovalainen, how did he reach Formula 1 and what happened in his F1 career after McLaren?

Kovalainen made his Formula 1 debut in 2007 with Renault after spending two years as a test driver and finishing runner-up to Nico Rosberg in GP2.

Michael Schumacher raced Kovalainen in the Race of Champions before this and the Finn came out on top, immediately creating some buzz around the youngster.

A podium during Kovalainen’s rookie campaign was enough to convince McLaren to do a straight swap between him and Alonso for 2008.

Alonso and Hamilton fell out at McLaren, and while the Finn finished seventh the year he lost to Vettel in Monza, things only got worse in 2009 when he finished outside the top 10 of the drivers’ championship.

McLaren let Kovalainen go even if he achieved the only victory of his F1 career with the team in Hungary, but that wasn’t the end of his time in the sport.

Three years with Team Lotus – later Caterham – kept him on the grid in a very uncompetitive car.

He went on to have a successful Super GT career and has returned to his Finnish roots and started rallying again.