Sepang 2026 · Stories
The Man Who Owns Sepang
By Will Tygart · September 28, 2026
Every great circuit has a driver it belongs to. Monaco has its kings. Monza has its heroes. And Sepang — quiet, steamy, absent from the calendar for nine years — belongs to Sebastian Vettel.
Four wins. More than anyone, ever, at the Malaysian Grand Prix. And a lap record — 1:34.080, set in a Ferrari during the 2017 race weekend — that has now survived every generation of Formula 1 car built since. Nine years of faster regulations, cleverer aerodynamics, and millions of development dollars, and nobody has touched it. Because nobody's been back.
That's the strange thing about a record set at a track that disappears. It doesn't get broken. It just... waits.
Vettel's Sepang story is really two stories. The first is the young charger with Red Bull, winning here in the years when he and that team were redefining dominance — including 2013, the year of the infamous "Multi 21" afternoon, when he ignored a direct team order and passed his own teammate Mark Webber for the win. Say what you like about that day — and people have said plenty — but it's part of why this track and this driver are tangled up in each other.
The second story is the Ferrari years. By 2017, Vettel was in red, chasing Mercedes, and his final Sepang weekend produced that lap record — 1:34.080 — in a car that was, on its day, the fastest thing in the world. Then Max Verstappen won the race, the circus packed up, and Formula 1 didn't come back for nearly a decade.
Think about what that record has outlived. Vettel himself retired. An entire regulation era came and went. Drivers who were in karting in 2017 are now on the grid — Kimi Antonelli, who leads the championship this season, was eleven years old when that lap was set. Let that sit for a moment. The fastest lap ever driven around Sepang was set before some of this year's frontrunners were teenagers.
And now the sport is going back. Same 5.543 kilometers. Same long sweep through Turns 5 and 6. Same tropical heat pressing down on everything. The current cars are wildly different machines from the 2017 Ferrari — and one of the quiet subplots of the weekend is whether Vettel's ghost lap finally falls.
Records are funny things. When they're set, they're just fast laps — a number on a timing screen, celebrated for an afternoon and filed away. They only become records, in the mythic sense, when they survive. When years pass and nobody can touch them. When they start to feel less like a time and more like a monument.
Vettel isn't coming back to defend it — he's retired, and that's that. So his record sits there unguarded, waiting for twenty drivers to take their shot at it. Maybe it falls in qualifying. Maybe the heat and the new cars conspire to keep it standing a little longer.
Either way, there's something fitting about it. The last time Formula 1 raced at Sepang, the fastest man around it was Sebastian Vettel. Nine years later, the first question of the weekend might be: can anyone go faster than a ghost?
Some records are broken. The best ones have to wait nine years for someone to try.