There’s been a lot of talk this year about Ferrari Formula 1 driver Sebastian Vettel retiring.

But when you talk to the 32-year-old, four-time world champion, you notice immediately that his passion for the sport is still intense. The fire still burns. Vettel still wants to win. He still loves what he is doing. It’s a passion going back to his childhood, roughly.

“I don’t remember the actual day,” he says. “It’s not like, oh yes, that’s when it started. It must have been on TV because my father was into hillclimbing. He was racing a Volkswagen Golf at the amateur level in Germany, and we were always traveling as a family. So from a very young age, motorsports was something we just did. Then when I was 3 or 4 years old, I got this go-kart.

I tried it, and I guess I must have liked it, but we had no clue what we were getting into. Then you start racing, you race these other kids, and then you understand

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Formula 1 as a child—these are the kings of what you are doing. They are in another world. So these are heroes. It was the same time, more or less, when Michael (Schumacher) was starting in Formula 1, his mid-’90s breakthrough when he was winning races and the championship, and there it was: You had somebody. The media was picking up, so they were broadcasting more and more. So I guess it must have been at some point around then.

“I had the chance to meet him, and from then on, he was my hero. And then I was following Formula 1. So that’s the beginning of it. That’s where I fell in love with Formula 1, in the mid-’90s.

“I think it was in 1992, my father took me to a pre-practice in Hockenheim. We got tickets very cheap. We had to walk down all the way to the first chicane, which at the time was a long walk. And it was pouring rain, and nobody was going out of the pits because there was aquaplaning. Then eventually people did an installation lap, which I know about now, but at the time, the ground starts vibrating, and you just hear this thing and it shoots past you like a torpedo with this jet of water behind. That I will never forget—the day, the rain, the sound, the vibrations. That’s why I’m a fan of the old days, because I think it was more raw in this regard. I think we need to keep an uncertainty, not to have it too sterile.”

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When you hear Vettel talk like this, you understand not only the passion, but also the intelligence. There are hints of this from his press conferences, but it comes across far more in conversation. He is a private person, so few people know anything about his personal life. He doesn’t really talk about it, politely declining to answer questions on the subject.

“I’m pretty happy,” he says with a smile. “I’m happy with my life. I think there’s a lot of people better-looking than me, but that’s OK. I’m happy with what I’ve got. If you can choose, you always think a bit of this and a bit of that.”

The week after the race in Canada this season, Vettel married his longtime partner Hanna Prater, mother of their daughters, Emilie and Matilda. They live not far from Konstanz, Germany, on the Swiss-German border, in a quiet country village.

“Yes, that is my life,” he says. “Obviously, racing is also my life, but if somebody asked me who are you, then the answer I think I would like to hear from myself is, I’m husband to Hanna and father to my kids and so on. This is who I am.

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“It’s not what I do that defines me,” he explains. “For a lot of people that follow from outside, yes, of course it is. It’s the same thing for me when I watch the tennis game and when I look at the guys, that’s who they are for me. But that’s not really who they are. Knowing from my own experience, it’s not like that. I think I’m judged like that.”

He admits quite happily that he is not perfect. He makes mistakes. “I am not always patient in the race,” he admits, “but you care so much, you have passion and emotions that drive you.”

In Canada, he was upset at a time penalty that took away a possible race win, but after the race when fans booed Lewis Hamilton on the podium, he defended his rival. Vettel, who has been racing in Formula 1 since 2007, believes in sportsmanship, and there is, obviously, a huge amount of respect between the two men.

“When we fight each other on the track, you give each other room or no room or whatever you do,” he says. “I always see it that way, that obviously when you fight on-track, you fight for yourself. That’s just being competitive. But that doesn’t mean that you need to be an ass when you get out of the car. If somebody has done better than you, it’s hard, but I appreciate it a lot if somebody comes to me that has just been defeated and then shakes my hand, looks me in the eyes and says ‘well done.’ So I also try to do that, even if I would like to run away and hide, because I think it’s the way it should be.

“And what fascinates me now is the level of perfection and how difficult it is to make a difference,” he says. “I think there have been some talks recently about how the cars are easy to drive, and some people misunderstand that. It’s so difficult to make a difference because everything is so transparent. There is so much data and so many cameras that advantages don’t last. If you have a faster line through a corner than anyone else, they know why within minutes.

“Making the difference in normal conditions, when everything is constant, is really difficult,” he says. “When it starts to rain or certain things start to happen, then there’s a bit more scope for doing something different. So I think that’s the fascinating thing about the old days. I had lunch years ago with Stirling Moss, and it was just fascinating, all the stories. I went to his house, and he had this folder. He had lots of photographs of the cars in his days. I’m a big fan of history, especially people who, at their time, were ahead and doing things differently.

“For some people, I’m old because I’ve been around a long time in Formula 1,” he says, smiling again. “I wouldn’t classify myself as old, yet even I notice the difference to when I was a kid. It’s like we have another safety net and another safety net and another safety net. The cars are safer than they were many years ago. And I think it’s a great thing for us and a great thing for everybody involved because I think some of the old stories were just horrible.”

Drivers take risks because they are doing something they love, and that thrill is impossible to replace. Today, the preparations are better, but things still can, and do, go wrong—and indeed, at the moment, Vettel is having a tough time.

“Sport, I think, is just a mirror of life, with the access for everyone to look at it, so you are on display. It’s not like normal people don’t have ups and downs; they have them, of course, but maybe they don’t have as many highs and lows. It’s not as high a high or as low a low, and not in such a short amount of time. When people talk about highs or lows, I don’t think I go as high or as low. So basically, ensuring that if the hole is there and I need to get out of it, it’s not as deep as it could be. Everybody’s different!”

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