Formula 1 driver Sebastian Vettel He has suffered the theft of a backpack in which he kept personal documentation this Monday first thing in the morning, as EL PERIÓDICO has advanced. The motorsport star had run this weekend the Montmeló Spanish Grand Prix and around eight in the morning he was circulating, along with members of his family, through the center of the Catalan capital.
In front of a hotel, Vettel had to leave the vehicle for a moment, which belongs to the same brand as the team with which he competes, Aston-Martin. That moment he has been taken advantage of by a thief who has taken a backpack -which contained the pilot’s personal documentation- and has fled. Vettel, after noticing the theft, has immediately realized that inside the backpack were his airpods headphones, that have GPS. So he took out his mobile phone and verified that he could indeed follow the thief’s route in real time, who was heading towards the Ciutat Vella district of Barcelona.
However, he has decided to give up the Aston Martin car and borrow another vehicle. A testimony that has seen the scene has told this newspaper that Vettel has approached a woman who had just arrived at the scene on an electric scooter and has asked her with these words: “I am Sebastian Vettel, Can you lend me your scooter?“. The woman, according to this testimony, has reacted contrary but has ended up agreeing after Vettel promised him that he would return it immediately. And he has kept his word.
With the new transportation system, Vettel has started tracking the thief. The Mossos d’Esquadra, who had already been alerted to the robbery and the chase that had just begun, contacted the pilot to ask him to stop following him and go to a police station to formalize the complaint so as not to expose himself to any risk. Vettel, however, has indicated that he was not in any danger because he was not in eye contact with the thief – or thieves – since he was only following their path through the phone.
According to police sources, a Mossos patrol has been able to meet with Vettel a few minutes later and, since then, the agents have continued with the tracking thanks to the information that the pilot has been transmitting to them live. Thus, the police have ended up going shortly after to the exact place where the signal has stopped: a haberdashery in Ciutat Vella. The headphones have appeared inside a vase of flowers. But there was no trace of the backpack. The most plausible thing is that the thief opened the bag, noticed that inside there were some ‘airpods’ that could be geolocated, and got rid of these in the first place he saw: the vase.
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The thief and the backpack are still missing, with all the personal documentation he kept, which includes the driver’s license that the pilot uses to drive around Spain.
The Mossos keep the investigation open to try to recover the bag and they have the recording made by the cameras of the hotel in front of which the robbery took place.