Sepang 2026 · Stories
Multi 21: The Win That Cost a Teammate
By Will Tygart · September 28, 2026
Every sport has a moment where winning the race means losing something bigger. Formula 1's most famous one happened at Sepang, in a Red Bull, and people are still arguing about it thirteen years later.
The 2013 Malaysian Grand Prix. Red Bull is running first and second late in the race — Mark Webber ahead, Sebastian Vettel behind. After the final round of pit stops, the team makes a decision: hold position. Bring both cars home. Don't risk the one-two fighting each other.
The order goes out over the radio, coded the way teams code everything: "Multi 21." Multi-function setting 21 — car number two ahead of car number one. Stay there. That's the instruction.
Vettel passes Webber anyway.
What followed is the stuff of paddock legend. Webber was furious — a driver who had done exactly what he was told, watching his teammate take the win in defiance of a direct order, in the same machinery, on the same team. The podium ceremony was ice. The press conference afterward was worse. Two teammates who had already spent years circling each other with barely concealed distrust had just run out of pretense entirely.
Vettel apologized to the team. Then, in the days that followed, came the admission that made the apology ring hollow: given the same situation, he would do it again. The competitive instinct that made him a champion was the same instinct that couldn't accept finishing second to his teammate when the win was there to take.
Here's what I find genuinely sad about it, more than a decade on: it worked, and it cost him. Vettel got his twenty-seventh Grand Prix victory that afternoon. He also got the permanent end of any real trust between him and Webber. They raced together for one more season, and it was never a partnership again — two drivers sharing a garage and nothing else. Webber left Formula 1 at the end of 2013.
There's a lesson in there that has nothing to do with racing. Team orders exist because a team is supposed to be bigger than either driver. The moment one driver decides it isn't — decides the win in front of him matters more than the agreement behind him — he usually gets the win. And he always pays for it somewhere else.
Sepang has hosted faster races, wetter races, more dramatic finishes. But I'm not sure it's ever hosted a more human one: two teammates, one instruction, and a young champion who heard it and chose himself.
Multi 21. He won the battle. The teammate was the price.