Racing
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Sebastian Vettel says Anthoine Hubert’s fatal crash at Spa in 2019 was the only time in more than two decades of racing that he seriously questioned getting back in the car, admitting he did not want to start the Belgian Grand Prix the next day.
Writing in The New York Times, the four-time Formula 1 world champion identified the Belgian Grand Prix weekend as the single moment that broke through the assumptions he had carried through his career about risk, speed and racing on. Hubert, 22, died from injuries sustained in the Formula 2 Feature Race at Spa-Francorchamps, which took place shortly after Formula 1 qualifying.
Vettel said the reaction was immediate and far stronger than a passing doubt. “In more than two decades of racing, there was a single time when I seriously questioned jumping into the car again,” Vettel wrote, before naming Spa 2019 as that moment. He said he called his wife, Hanna, after the accident and told her he did not want to race on Sunday.
“I slept poorly that night; yet I decided to race,” he wrote. The significance of that decision is less in the result than in what it revealed about Vettel’s state of mind at the time. For a driver who had spent his career accepting danger as part of elite motorsport, Hubert’s death forced a more personal reckoning.
Vettel explained that the crash landed differently from the accidents he had previously known in racing. He said he had been through incidents himself, but they had been minor, and he had also seen other drivers crash. What he could not shake at Spa was the finality of what happened to Hubert. “That young man had his whole life ahead of him, and it just stopped with all of us watching,” Vettel wrote.
That is the point at which his account moves beyond grief and into a deeper reassessment of the sport itself. Vettel said the weekend changed the way he understood what racing speed really meant. “After that weekend, I felt differently about my sport,” he wrote, adding that he was “never afraid of the speeds, but now I could see them, not just feel them.”
He said that shift was not something he fully understood immediately. Only later did he grasp that Spa had given him a new sense of responsibility. In his words, he “began to experience a responsibility” he had not felt before, a change that reframed the pursuit of performance rather than rejecting it.
Vettel’s conclusion was that speed and technical progress could no longer be treated as values on their own. “I started to understand that speed, progress and innovation only matter if they move us in the right direction,” he wrote, casting the 2019 Spa weekend as the moment that permanently changed his view of what motorsport should demand from the people inside it.