“Today is such a special day for me. I don’t really know what to say, I am speechless.”

There’s no doubt about it – when a driver joins the Scuderia Ferrari and takes his first race victory, it’s a special day in Formula 1. Not only that, Sebastian Vettel managed to do it by overcoming the dominant Mercedes duo of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg who we all thought were untouchable going into the Malaysia GP weekend.

No gifts, no slip-ups – Vettel beat the Mercedes AMG drivers on pure pace and a great strategy from from the Ferrari pit wall. Perhaps this why the German was so tearful before and on the podium, particularly as the Italian national anthem belted out over the P.A. Here is Sebastian Vettel’s first win for Ferrari, in photos and in quotes from the man himself:

“Grande gara, bella macchina! (A great race and a beautiful car).”

“It was amazing to look down from the podium and see the mechanics, the engineers, the whole team and listen to the German and Italian anthems.”

“The atmosphere in the team has always been great, but it’s just getting better and better. For today, the important thing is for all of us to enjoy this moment together and celebrate. I did not swap teams that much in the past, so winning for a new team is always a relief.”

“Since I joined Ferrari I felt incredibly welcome and together we have worked to improve things. The potential, as I always said, is huge, it’s good to see what a step forward we did over the winter. There were a lot of changes in the background (including one driver…) which never make things easy, but everyone saw the positives of that.”

“This is a special day, it has been a while since both I and team won for the last time. I’d like to be in the same position at every race, but we must be realistic, Mercedes were a bit struggling today but they have a great package and our target is to make the gap smaller at every Grand Prix and make sure that we are the team right behind them.”