Chapter Text
There are things you learn to carry when you grow up between two countries. Two toothbrushes. Two winter coats — one for the kind of cold that bites through Melbourne’s July mornings, another for the sort that sits heavy and white across the hills of Baar. Two bedrooms. Two sets of house rules. Two fathers who never quite look each other in the eye.
I was good at carrying things. I was good at the logistics of it — knowing which passport to pull out at which counter, which suitcase had my school books and which had the clothes I’d outgrown since the last visit. By the time I was ten I could navigate Zurich Airport with my eyes closed, and by twelve the handovers stopped and I could do the whole unaccompanied minor routine without the flight attendant having to explain a single thing. I’d smile, I’d take the lanyard, I’d read my book for fourteen hours, and then I’d walk out into whatever version of home was waiting for me on the other side.
The thing is, though — and I didn’t understand this until much later — is that the two homes weren’t just different countries. They were different temperatures. And I don’t mean the weather.
* * * * * * * * *
Dad’s house in Melbourne sits on a hill above Port Phillip Bay. On clear mornings you can see all the way to the city skyline, which at that distance looks like a row of teeth. The house is open-plan, lots of glass, the kind of architecture that’s meant to say something about the person who lives there. Dad’s cycling trophies line the hallway — the ones from after F1, from the endurance racing years. There are very few photos from before.
That was the first thing I noticed, though I didn’t notice it the way you notice something wrong. It was just the shape of things. In Melbourne, the house was clean and airy and there was always sport on television and Dad cooked steak on the barbecue on Friday nights and we’d eat outside with the possums rustling through the trees above us. There was a routine to it. Dad is a man of routines. He runs in the morning, showers, eats the same breakfast every day — muesli, black coffee, half a grapefruit. He’d drive me to school and pick me up and ask about my day in that way adults ask when they genuinely want to know but aren’t quite sure what to do with the answer.
He was a good father. Is a good father. But looking back, there was something held-in about the way he moved through the house, like he was being careful not to brush against anything too hard. The hallway where the trophies were had a gap on the second shelf. I used to wonder what went there. I don’t wonder anymore.
* * * * * * * * *
When I was eight, my teacher Mrs. Langley asked the class to share what we’d done over the summer holidays. This was February, start of the Australian school year, and I’d just come back from six weeks in Switzerland.
I stood at the front of the classroom and said I’d gone skiing in the Alps, and that my stepfather had taken me ice fishing on a frozen lake, and that my other dad had taught me how to make German pancakes, except he’d burned most of them. The class laughed at that part. A boy named Callum said he wished he had two dads in two countries because then he’d get double Christmas presents. Everyone agreed this was the best arrangement imaginable.
I walked out of school that afternoon feeling strange and buoyant, the way you feel when people envy something you’ve never thought to be proud of. Dad was waiting at the gate, and in the car I told him what I’d said, about the skiing and the pancakes and Callum’s comment about double Christmas. I was smiling. I wanted him to smile too.
He did smile. But it was the wrong kind — the kind that arrives a beat too late and doesn’t reach past his mouth. He looked at the road and said, “Sounds like you had a good time, mate,” and turned the radio on.
I sat in the passenger seat and the buoyancy leaked out of me slowly, like air from a tire. I didn’t understand why. I wouldn’t understand for years. All I knew was that I’d said the wrong thing, or maybe the right thing in the wrong place, and that there were rules to this life that nobody had explained to me — rules about what you were allowed to be happy about and in front of whom.
* * * * * * * * *
Switzerland was different. Switzerland was loud.
Not loud in an obvious way — Seb isn’t a shouter, and Kimi might be the quietest man I've ever been in a room with. But the house in Baar always had something happening. Seb would be reorganising the kitchen while explaining the aerodynamic principles of a paper aeroplane to whoever happened to be within earshot. The dog would be running around. There’d be football on the television — proper football, Seb would insist, not that thing they play in Melbourne — and Kimi would be somewhere in the background doing something deeply Finnish, like building shelves or staring out the window at the rain with an expression of total contentment.
The first time I visited Seb in Switzerland I was five. I don’t remember much — the flight, probably, though that’s more a feeling than a memory. What I do remember is the kitchen. Seb had made Spätzle and it was terrible. He admitted this freely, laughing, scraping most of it into the bin while Kimi silently pulled out bread and cheese and cold cuts and arranged them on a board without being asked.
I remember watching them in the kitchen. Seb talking, Kimi listening. Seb’s hand on Kimi’s arm as he reached past him for a plate. The way Kimi shifted, barely perceptible, to make room for Seb’s body in the narrow space between the counter and the stove. It was choreography. It was the kind of thing that only happens when two people have learned each other’s shapes.
* * * * * * * * *
Kimi took me fishing for the first time when I was seven.
I should say: Kimi didn’t ask me. He simply appeared in the kitchen at six in the morning on a Saturday while Seb was still asleep, set a pair of small rubber boots by my chair, and said, “We go fishing.”
I put on the boots. They were exactly my size. I didn’t ask where we were going because something about Kimi’s manner made questions feel unnecessary, like asking a river where it was headed. You just followed.
We drove for twenty minutes to a lake I didn’t know the name of. Kimi carried two rods and a tackle box that looked older than me. He set everything up — mine first, then his — and sat down on a flat rock near the shore and that was it. That was the activity.
We sat there for three hours. In three hours, Kimi said exactly four things: “Hold it like this,” when showing me the rod. “Wait,” when I tried to reel in too early. “Good,” when I caught a small perch. And “Hungry?” around nine o’clock, at which point he produced two sandwiches from his jacket pocket that had been in there the entire time, slightly warm and squashed, and they were the best sandwiches I’d ever eaten.
I didn’t understand then what Kimi was giving me. I thought it was just fishing. But it wasn’t. I didn’t have a word for it then. Proximity, maybe. He was there, I was there, and neither of us needed to be anything other than what we were.
We went back every Saturday I was in Switzerland after that. It became ours — the only tradition in my split life that belonged to just two people and didn’t carry the weight of everything else. Seb never came. I think he understood, in the way Seb understands most things — instinctively, generously — that this was something his son and his partner needed to have without him. A space with no history in it.
Years later, when a journalist asked me in a press conference what I do to relax, I said fishing. Lando, sitting next to me, almost fell off his chair laughing. But it’s true. When I need to be still, when the noise of the paddock and the telemetry and the radio chatter becomes too much, I think of that lake and that rock and Kimi’s silence beside me, and I can breathe again. I never told Kimi this. I think he knows. That’s the thing about Kimi — you never have to tell him. He just knows.
* * * * * * * * *
The handovers happened at airports, always. Usually Zurich or Melbourne, occasionally somewhere in between if the schedule didn’t line up. They had a pattern.
Dad would arrive first. He’s the sort of person who gets to the airport two hours early and considers this a moral virtue. He’d be standing near the arrivals gate with his hands in his pockets, sunglasses on even indoors, and he’d spot me before I spotted him because he was always looking.
Then there’d be the hug — big, warm, his chin on the top of my head for as long as I’d let him. And then: the handover.
If Seb was dropping me off, he’d walk me to the gate and wait. He’d crouch down to my level when I was small, fix my collar or my backpack straps, tell me to be good and ring him when I landed. Then he’d stand up and face Dad, and something would shift. His whole body would reorganise itself. Shoulders back, chin up, smile fixed just slightly too wide.
“Hey, Mark.”
“Sebastian.”
Always the full name. Never Seb. I didn’t think anything of it when I was young. Now I think about it constantly.
They’d exchange the essentials — flight details, medication if I’d been sick, the name of my teacher if it was the start of a new term. It was transactional. Efficient. Two people running a logistics operation. Occasionally Kimi would be there, standing a few steps behind Seb with his hands in his jacket, and Dad would nod at him and Kimi would nod back and that was the full extent of their interaction. Two nods across a distance of about three metres and twenty years of unspoken history.
I grew up in the space between those nods.
* * * * * * * * *
I asked Dad once, when I was thirteen, why he and Seb weren’t together.
We were in the car, which is the only place teenage boys ask real questions — you don’t have to make eye contact, and there’s always the road to look at. Dad didn’t flinch. I’ll give him that. He kept his eyes forward and his hands at ten and two and after a long pause he said:
“Some things don’t work out, Osc. Doesn’t mean anyone did anything wrong.”
Which was such a careful, grown-up, diplomatic non-answer that I immediately knew someone had done something wrong.
I didn’t push it. That’s another thing you learn when you grow up between two homes: how to leave a question in the air. How to let it hang. You develop an instinct for the load-bearing walls, the ones you don’t lean on because the whole structure might come down.
So I let it go. I let it go for years.
* * * * * * * * *
The racing crept in sideways, the way it does. There was no single moment when I decided — it was more like I’d always been deciding, slowly, without knowing it. Both my fathers were racing drivers. The house in Melbourne had a go-kart in the garage before it had a proper sofa. The house in Switzerland had Seb’s old helmets on a shelf in the study, displayed with the care other people reserve for first editions.
I started karting when I was nine, which is late by most standards. Dad took me to a track outside Melbourne on a Saturday morning and stood at the barrier with his arms crossed and said nothing for the first twenty minutes. Then I came in and he crouched down, the way Seb used to crouch at the airport, and his face was doing something complicated.
“You’re quick,” he said. Then, quieter: “Christ, you’re quick.”
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to. But that night, after I’d gone to bed, I heard him on the phone. His voice was low, the way it gets when he’s talking about something that costs him effort, and I caught a single sentence through the wall:
“He’s got your feel for it, Sebastian. Bloody terrifying.”
I lay there in the dark and didn’t move. Something in his voice — some frequency I couldn’t name — made me feel like I’d accidentally overheard something private. Not the words. The way he said Sebastian. Like it was a word he kept in a different part of his mouth.
* * * * * * * * *
I told Seb myself a few days later. I called him on a school night.
“Seb, I want to race.”
There was a pause. Not a Dad-pause, where you can hear the gears turning behind the silence. A Seb-pause, which is warm and full, like he’s savouring something.
“I know,” he said. His voice was smiling — I could hear it. “Your father told me. But I was waiting for you to tell me.”
That was such a Seb thing to do. He’d known for days, and he’d sat with it, let me come to him in my own time, because he understood — the way he understands most things — that this was mine to give, not his to take.
“Are you—” I started, not sure what I was asking. Are you happy? Are you scared? Are you thinking about what this means, that I’m choosing the thing that broke our family apart?
“Oscar,” he said, and his voice had gone serious now, the laughter folded away somewhere safe. “You are going to be brilliant. You hear me? Brilliant.”
Within a month he’d sent me three boxes of books — autobiographies, engineering manuals, the kind of dense technical reading that most nine-year-olds would use as a doorstop. They arrived suspiciously fast, as if he’d been packing them before I’d even made the call. There was a note on top in his handwriting, which is terrible, all loops and angles, practically a different alphabet:
Read the Fangio one first. Then the Lauda. Then the rest in whatever order you want. Call me when you’ve finished and we’ll talk about the bits they got wrong. —S
I read the Fangio one in three days. I called him. We talked for two hours. Kimi picked up the extension at one point, listened for about thirty seconds, said “the boy has good taste,” and hung up. That was the most Kimi had ever said to me about racing in a single sentence, and I treasured it.
* * * * * * * * *
Here is what I know about my father and here is what I don’t know.
I know he left Formula 1 at the end of 2013. I know he raced for Red Bull. I know he raced alongside Sebastian Vettel, who is my other father, and that their time together produced four World Championships and a child and, apparently, nothing else worth mentioning. I know he moved back to Australia. I know he took me with him. I know Seb let him.
I don’t know why.
Not the real why. Not the underneath-why. I’ve looked up their racing record — of course I have. I’ve seen the clip from Malaysia 2013, the one the internet never tires of replaying. I’ve read the interviews, the ones where Dad is very measured and very careful and says things like “It’s a chapter that’s closed.” I’ve read Seb’s side too, the halting, half-apologetic answers he gave that year, looking young and bewildered in a way that doesn’t match the man I know now.
But none of it tells me what happened in the room. In the house. Between them, after the cameras turned off and the helmets came off and it was just two people who’d made a child together and couldn’t figure out what that meant.
I’m twenty-two now. I drive for McLaren. And the thing about this paddock is that it’s full of ghosts. Not the dead kind. The other kind. The kind that are still walking around, doing punditry, showing up to the drivers’ parade, shaking your hand and looking at you with an expression you can’t quite read because you look like someone they used to know.
I have my father’s jawline and my other father’s eyes and I walk into this paddock every race weekend and people see them before they see me.
I carry it. I’m good at carrying things.
But this season, something is shifting. Dad’s been around more — he’s doing commentary for some of the European races, which means he’s in the paddock, which means there are moments. Moments where I turn a corner and he’s there, talking to someone, and across the garage or the hospitality suite or the pit lane, Seb is also there, because Seb’s been doing some work with the FIA, and for the first time in years they are occupying the same physical space and I can feel the air pressure change.
Something is going to give. I don’t know what it is yet. But I’ve spent my whole life reading the distance between two people — measured in airports, in phone calls, in the careful way they say each other’s names — and I know when that distance is about to collapse.
I know. I’m their son.