Sebastian Vettel was playing true to instincts as a racer by pulling fast one on Red Bull team-mate Mark Webber He is forged in the image of Dr Helmut Marko, his arch-defender and the team's director of motorsport, who spent his formative years tearing along icy Austrian country lanes with Jochen Rindt on the understanding that if they crashed, they were on their own. Obscured by Vettel's latest imbroglio with Webber is his record as a brilliant, uncompromising racer, whose 27 wins and 38 pole positions continue to expose the fallacious logic that he has achieved three world titles solely because he boasts a car designed by the peerless Adrian Newey. Let us not forget that his maiden triumph arrived as long ago as Monza in 2008 - in a Toro Rosso. If his distinctions were mechanically enhanced, then why has Webber won only nine grands prix with the same machinery? The explicit hierarchy at Red Bull is in place for a reason. And it is this accepted order that Vettel so mercilessly exploited last Sunday, subjugating the authority of team principal Christian Horner and emasculating even a proud Antipodean male like Webber without the slightest remorse. He was there to win his 25 championship points, to pounce upon the first-lap retirement of chief rival Fernando Alonso, to assert his status as Red Bull's de facto leader. Webber's molten stare afterwards also betrayed a frayed self-esteem, the pain of which he is only now trying to palliate with a fortnight's surfing in Australia. How disparate are the standards we apply to the greatest drivers. Ayrton Senna once defended his audacity by claiming: "We are competing to win, and if you no longer go for a gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver." Then, the world of F1 genuflected. Now, the same people label Vettel as brattish because he displays the same characteristics in the cockpit. It is perhaps the legacy of the Schumacher era that Vettel is unfairly painted as just another Teutonic automaton. The fact that he has a reputation for being remote, sheltering from the lenses with girlfriend Hanna Prater in the Swiss village of Walchwil, and that he represents a team created from a sickly sweet energy drink all adds to a misplaced suspicion of soullessness. But viewed another way, his antics in Malaysia could underline the emergence of the finest driver we have been privileged to witness. Win a fourth title, and Vettel would elevate himself to the company of Alain Prost. Only the great Argentine Juan Manuel Fangio and Schumacher would remain ahead and he would still, scarcely credibly, be 26. Thus, his little piece of chicanery at Webber's expense spoke of a young man impatient to cut further swathes through the records of his sport. Frank Scheider, columnist for Bild in Germany, calls it the "dirtbag" philosophy. "Vettel's killer instinct won't make him more popular with his Formula One colleagues," he writes. But it is also what sets him apart from middle-of-the-road drivers. Schumacher was either loved or hated. Vettel is on his way to being the same. The passage of time, and the tempering of Webber's immediate grievance, should highlight the irrationality of such hatred. Vettel is simply astoundingly talented, and possessed of that touch of the devil where true greatness lies.