Sepang 2026 · Stories
They Closed the Book on Sepang
By Will Tygart · September 28, 2026
Nobody owned Sepang's final decade like Red Bull. Five wins — including the last two races the circuit ever held.
Start with Sebastian Vettel, because Sepang was his place before it was anyone's argument. Three wins in the blue car: 2010, 2011, 2013. The 2013 one is the complicated one — the afternoon of "Multi 21," the most famous disobeyed team order in Formula 1 history, when Vettel took a win his team had told him not to take and broke something with Mark Webber that never fully healed. I've told that story in full elsewhere. What's worth saying here is simpler: even the wins that caused earthquakes were won at Sepang. The track and the team were tangled up in each other.
Then 2016 — the strange, smoky, unforgettable one. Lewis Hamilton's engine blew while he was leading, and Daniel Ricciardo was there to pick up the pieces: his first win in over two years, the widest grin in the paddock, a shoey on the podium. It was the kind of victory that only happens when someone else's disaster becomes your miracle, and Ricciardo celebrated it like a man who understood exactly how lucky and how good he was at the same time.
And then the last one. The 2017 Malaysian Grand Prix — the final Formula 1 race Sepang would hold, though nobody knew it was goodbye at the time. Max Verstappen, twenty years old, won it. A kid who'd grown up watching this track's chaos on television went out and conquered it in person, and the book closed with a Red Bull on the top step.
Five wins across eight seasons. The only team to win Sepang's last two Grands Prix. When people talk about the circuit's modern era — the sweeping corners, the monsoon roulette, the heat that broke cars and men — they're mostly describing races Red Bull won.
So here they are again, nine years later, rolling back into the place where they said goodbye without knowing it was goodbye. The faces are different. The cars are unrecognizable. But the track remembers who owned it last, and the team that closed the book gets to write the first line of the new one.
Some teams visit Sepang. Red Bull is coming home to a house it used to own.