The Race F1 Podcast
Bring Back V10s: Turkey 2010 - The dramatic fallout from big Vettel/Webber clash
14 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Athletic.
Red Bull was flying high in the early part of the 2010 F1 season with drivers Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel tied at the top of the standings, having won three of the opening six races. Another win seemed to be on the cards as they ran first and second in the Turkish Grand Prix.
But instead, we got the first major flashpoint between two drivers who would continue to have a strained relationship during their time in the same garage as they collided while battling for the lead at Istanbul Park, handing a 1-2 to the chasing McLarens.
Red Bull then seemed to make the situation worse by handling the fallout really badly, while McLaren had their own misunderstanding to fix after the race as well, as their cars nearly collided while battling for the lead a few laps later. Welcome to Bring Back V10's latest detour into the V8 era. as we look back on everything that was going on around the 2010 Turkish Grand Prix.
And joining me, Glenn Freeman, to do that are two men who were there that weekend. It's always fun when we get to do this with people who are on site. So we've got Ed Straw and John Noble.
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Chapter 2: What was the significance of the Vettel/Webber clash during the 2010 Turkish Grand Prix?
John, I'll come to you first for the typical opening question. Turkey 2010, frighteningly long time ago now. But when you think back to that weekend, what's the first thing that comes to mind?
Well, the collision between Seb Vettel and Weber still stands out, an iconic F1 moment. But also with this V10 thing, I always like going back through my hard drive photos at home just to see what happened this weekend because sometimes you do so many races and you can't remember various moments.
And quite a fun one that one of the best photos of Turkey 2010 was Ed Straw climbing out of a hire car on a ferry, trying to get from the passenger side out through the driver's side because there wasn't a big enough gap for him to climb out of the car.
It's a very well-liveried hire car as well, wasn't it? Which I didn't remember. Well-livery? What was the livery? The big Hertz livery on it.
Oh, amazing.
Very strange.
Ed, other than clambering out of a car on a ferry, what stands out for you for that weekend?
Well, something that's often referred to privately is about the other person in this room who was in Turkey in 2010, in producer Johnny. What's this going to be?
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Chapter 3: How did Red Bull handle the fallout from the collision?
Who was there for F1 racing. So we were, if memory serves, all travelling together. I believe you were on that same ferry. But we popped into this little small shop to get some supplies. Me, John Noble, Johnny Reynolds. and got the bag of supplies and the guy put it all in the bag and it was paid for.
It was just this fantastic moment where he had the bag and he was having to work out who to give it to. So he looked at John Noble, looked at me, and then straight away looked at little Johnny Reynolds and just gave him the bag. And we decided that was the moment that he decided Johnny Reynolds was the serf.
He had to do all the fetching and the carrying, which actually did accurately portray the status. So he was our serf for that particular Turkish Grand Prix and that's always stuck in mind for some reason.
I did not see that coming. This has been already one of the best openings to a show. With apologies to producer Johnny.
Chapter 4: What were the challenges faced by McLaren during the race?
No apologies. Well, I was going to say, he's kind of still in that role now, isn't he? He is the podcast, sir. Yeah, he makes the rest of us look good. Let's get back on track. A big talking point going into the Turkey weekend then was the news that Sebastian Vettel was getting a new chassis from Red Bull off the back of him being outpaced by teammate Mark Webber at the previous two races.
Vettel admitted he'd been complaining that something wasn't right with his car. So he felt it was good that Red Bull were making the change and he reckoned it would explain a lot. He accepted it didn't mean he would suddenly arrive in Turkey and everything would be fine. But he was hopeful the change would make him happier in the car.
And after first practice on Friday, he said that new chassis felt more natural to drive. So he's very happy with the change. However, Weber said years later in his book that Red Bull management had decided to tell Vettel his old chassis was cracked, even though it wasn't.
Webber said that team boss Christian Horner allowed Helmut Marko to deliver the news to Vettel to help him rationalise the fact he'd just been well and truly beaten by the old Aussie in the other car. Webber said that in Vettel's mind, it was beyond comprehension that I could beat him fair and square. There had to be another reason why.
And he said that Red Bull's decision to boost Vettel's confidence in this way said a lot about what was going on at the heart of the team. John, what do you think of that? If Vettel's original chassis was fine, is it still kind of OK for Red Bull to let him think there was a problem if they think that's going to kind of fix his head?
Yeah, but you have to put this in the context of that Red Bull wasn't necessarily a divided team, but there were definitely factions involved.
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Chapter 5: How did Robert Kubica perform at Renault during the 2010 season?
Well, I mean, Turkey blew into the open. Yeah. But those the kind of the factions and the team Vettel camp and team Weber camp were clearly inside that team. And off the back of Mark's victories, it was clear that whichever whoever was on team Vettel wasn't happy and needed to justify things and push things on. And I think with chassis changes, often a lot of it is to do with the driver's head.
We see this even up to F1 today. You'll see drivers complain about chassis. Teams will either tell them it's changed or will have found nothing wrong. And they'll say, oh, it feels completely different. So there was an element of that. So you can understand if you're Team Vettel and you're trying to... explain things to him, keep him happy, push him on, put him into the right place.
You will have done anything you can to have given Seb the benefit of the doubt and get him into a happy place, at least until qualifying when there was another problem.
And as a footnote, that chassis did return later in the season and Webber used it and I think he won in that car. So, OK, you can patch it up and make fixes. But just to underline the fact that it was the old psychological trick, yeah, it did later win races. But I don't think Vettel used it again.
um now you could argue that that was just giving the bad chassis to weber but i don't think it was about that it was it's the it's i was gonna say it's the oldest trick in the book but obviously uh chassis in that sense have only been around for a certain amount of time but uh it's always that that thing of people thinking there's something wrong with the car they can't get to the bottom of is always there there are times when there is something i can think of times where there were bonding failures and that kind of thing that weren't picked up but in this case yeah it was uh it was the the psychological games
And as you say, that still goes on today. I think that's fine. If your driver's got into a kind of mental funk over something and you can at least give them that change and it makes them think there's been a reset, I think it makes sense. It's, yeah, not the oldest trick in the book, but it's been around a long time. I'm sure...
I'm sure Ross Brawn has told a story about either Ferrari or Mercedes did that to Michael Schumacher once. And they just changed the chassis plate. They didn't actually change the car. Anyway, we'll come back to Red Bull later. Someone who arrived in Turkey in really good form was Robert Kubica. He was off to a great start to life at Renault.
He already had two podiums to his name from the first six races of the year.
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Chapter 6: What was the impact of Michelin's bid to become F1's tire supplier?
And in Monaco, he'd started on the front row and finished third behind the two Red Bulls. Kubica warned people not to expect too much in Turkey, though, which he expected to be more like the Spanish Grand Prix, where he'd qualified seventh and finished eighth.
He said it was important not to become over-optimistic because he felt it would be difficult to repeat the Monaco performance on a more conventional track. He also said that Renault had focused on maximising the strengths that it knew the car had during pre-season testing and that the team should be proud of the start it had made.
But even so, he was surprised to have started the year that well, leaving him sixth in the championship at this point, ahead of Lewis Hamilton's McLaren, among others. Ed, what did you make of the way Kubica really just hit the ground running with Renault at the start of that 2010 season?
Yeah, there was a degree of surprise because you have to remember that scene was in a bit of a mess because they'd had technical problems as well. They'd had wind tunnel trouble, so they'd re-kitted their wind tunnel, etc. And then there'd been all the fallout from Singapore. Yeah, they're not really Renault anymore by this point, are they? Exactly, yeah. So, so much has changed there.
And I remember when Kubica signed there, there were other options. Williams was another good option as well. And you sort of thought, is that the right
decision to make and uh no kibitz was absolutely on the money there and yeah he'd really made a strong impression though and the team had kind of got itself onto an even keel right from the start in bahrain actually where if memory serves i don't think he got a good result but he qualified decently and could have qualified actually a little bit better so even on their lesser tracks the car was decent and on places like monaco and then later in the season suzuka etc it could be really really mega so yeah kibitz uh
really showed what he could do there because he had that experience that he hadn't had when he'd come into BMW Sauber. And he was really, at that point, the kibitzer who knew what he wanted and was really pushing his team in a way that would be really annoying if he wasn't so good. And still slightly, it can be slightly annoying when...
Even when a driver's that good, but Kubica still does this to this day because he really, he's the guy who will push on every single thing that he thinks, right, this is not right. This should be this way. Why aren't we doing that? Why aren't we doing that? Why haven't you already done it? I'm going to keep saying it. That's just what you get with Kubica. And it's a great thing.
It's what that team needed as well.
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Chapter 7: How did Ferrari's performance compare to Red Bull and McLaren in 2010?
And he told the team straight away. He said Renault had responded well, even if on some issues, the team maybe took a bit too long and didn't agree in the beginning. But the things he wanted to change were changed. He said the reason he'd been so forceful was... was because he knew it was important to move quickly in the right direction to be ready for the start of the season.
And there were things that he suggested that the team wasn't used to doing that took a bit longer to convince them to do. Team boss Eric Boulier said Kubica had an excellent understanding with the team and that it was a pleasure to work with a driver who is as hungry for success as we are. Speaking about 2010 on F1's Beyond the Grid podcast, Kvitsa said that was his best 10 months of work in F1.
John, we all know how fast Robert was. And as Ed kind of outlined there, there was always this really strong, steely, behind-the-scenes drive that he had that you maybe didn't always see in public.
But do you think being that forceful and being a guy who can go in and say, you need to change this, this and this straight away, was that almost underestimated in all of the things that made Kubica such a great force at this point in F1?
Yeah, it's how a team views it, because you can be forceful and it can trigger pushback. And why are we being told what to do by a driver who doesn't do anything? But equally, if the driver is as strong as Kubica was, pushed on, delivered the results, and even when he delivered, wanted more and pushed on more, then I think that empowers him.
And especially at a team like Renault in this period, post all the Singapore fallout, They'd lost Fernando, title sponsors had gone, all the chaos and worries about the future. So it needed kind of its belief back and a focal point and someone to push it on and focus on what can we do better rather than worrying about what's happened in the past and reflecting on failures and what's gone wrong.
And are we about to... you know, pull out of Formula One and it's all over for us. So, and I think Robert was very forceful. It caused, you know, we know the problems it caused at BMW Sauber with Mario Tyson and pushing on. But I think it fitted in perfectly where Renault was at, how the team and Eric were taken as criticisms, where Kubica was in his career.
And it's just a shame that that, I'd love to have seen where that would have gone on were it not for that rally crash.
And it's worth noting as well that The kind of Alonso return to that team had kind of trailed off a bit. I remember speaking to one relatively senior engineer at that team. He said they got a bit frustrated with Alonso at the back end of the year. So, actually, there's an extra effect because they had a slightly diminished Alonso who was a bit frustrated. In 2009. In 2009, yeah.
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Chapter 8: What led to the communication issues between McLaren drivers Hamilton and Button?
And then they got Kubica in and... They thought, well, let's see how good this guy is. And they realised not only is he mega, but also he is that sort of driving force. So they actually quite wanted that as well, even though there will have been times, knowing Kubica well, where they will have grumbled a bit. He's a pain, but he's probably right. That's just the kind of character he is.
There was another significant piece of news for F1 ahead of the Turkish Grand Prix as Bernie Eccleston announced that F1 will be going back to America in 2012. A new track built in Austin, Texas, the track we now know as the Circuit of the Americas. This may be hard to believe for newer fans as we sit here with three U.S. races on.
on the modern calendar, but the addition of Austin would bring back the United States Grand Prix for the first time since 2007 when Indianapolis last hosted it. Bernie said this was a big deal because for the first time in the history of Formula One in the United States, a world-class facility will be purpose-built to host the event.
I've been looking for the right place and I hope now that we have a permanent home. Now, both of you have been to the US Grand Prix at Austin countless times. Ed, is it fair to say that in this case, Austin delivered what Bernie was hoping for?
Well, to an extent, it was... I was expecting you to be a lot more emphatic than that. Right from the start, it was a great event. Right. It really was a great event. Fantastic circuit.
I remember being there at the first free practice session, which was freezing cold, and watching Kimi RƤikkƶnen wheel spinning, trying to get out of the pit exit, which was obviously up a hill, and there was just no grip and everything. But, you know, great track to watch at, great event, and it got good attendances straight away. So... It did give F1 a good proper facility in the US.
But I wouldn't say the existence of that race in itself kind of opened the doors in the US or anything. It's very easy to say that's the starting point for what we're seeing now. And I don't think it was actually, because even that event has gone from, you know, decent crowds to just the crowds they get now are way bigger than they were before. in the 2010s.
So it was a positive and it was a great event and it remains a great event, but I don't think it opened the door really to the US in a clear way. Everything didn't follow from that point. It was a nice event to have, good for the calendar, good to go to, but...
The limitations of the way F1 was run in the Bernie Eccleston era meant that just doing that on its own was never going to be enough to really open the door in the US market. But it was nice to have a little foothold. That was quite important because you had all the indie nonsense in 2005. So to have seven years after a new event happening, because 2012 was the first one, wasn't it, I think?
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