The Athletic

Sebastian Vettel only had to wait until his second race in red to take his first win as a Ferrari driver,

and in the process, he inflicted Mercedes' first proper defeat at the

hybrid era at the 2015 Malaysian Grand Prix. Vetter and Ferrari's triumph was well-timed, as

Mercedes dominance in the season Oprah in Australia had set alarm bells ringing that its

dominance was going to do serious damage to F1, although complaints from a struggling Red Bull team that dominated the end

of the V8 era fell on pretty deaf ears and were even mocked by world champion Lewis Hamilton.

While all of that was going on at the front, McLaren and Honda were talking up how much

progress they were making at the back of the field. As Fernando Alonzo returned to F1 after missing Australia due to a concussion,

suffered in one of F1's most mysterious accidents in testing.

Welcome to the second ever hybrid episode of Bring Back V10s with me, Glenn Freeman,

and to help us revisit Malaysia 2015, I'm joined by two men who were there

at Sopang that weekend, Ben Anderson and Ed Straw. Ben, hopefully this is a little easier than when

you have to stretch your memory back 30 years or over a quarter of a century or whatever it is into

the 90s. This is only 10 years ago, you were covering the race. So hopefully when I say

when you think back to Malaysia 2015, what's the first thing that comes to mind? You've got plenty

to choose from. Well, yeah, you say this, but I could have sworn I had a memory of speaking to

Adrian Suttall as the newly announced Williams Reserve Driver on this weekend, but it never happened. I can find no evidence of it. When I checked with Ed, he's, he, he, he insisted that we, that we did no interview with him, that he just, he didn't the garage the whole weekend. So I think I've conflated two years into one. No, no, no, it was, um, it was, it was, it was, it was in our notes. We were, it hasn't made the cut. I mean,

there was plenty to choose from and I couldn't get excited about Adrian's sister to become a

Williams Reserve driver because I don't remember it happening. I feel that it had no influence on

anything that followed, but we've talked about it now. So, yeah, I'll have to show you the notes afterwards. Okay. Maybe there's a quote. Maybe there's a quote that we picked up that you actually got and maybe you did speak to him. I'll send you the quote and then you'll go, no, that definitely wasn't me. Yeah, I mean, I remember he did nothing for Williams. It was one of the most pointlessly announced deals anyway. But my overriding memory of that weekend is standing trackside at FP1,

trying not to burn horrendously in the gap in the ozone that exists over that circuit,

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