All of which brings us to Sebastian Vettel, perhaps the most ‘sync‑button’ driver on the grid. There was always a certain clinical quality to those four world titles, a blue-riband excellence that is hard to convey on television, a sense that for all his occasional displays of emotion, Vettel is a man who drives with his computer-head rather than his loins. Which is why this season, the most difficult of his career, has also been by some distance his most interesting.