Rewind to November 29 2014. It's Sebastian Vettel's first day at Ferrari, and he's set to drive a red car for the first time at the team's Fiorano test track.

It's an emotional moment. As a young child, the future four-time world champion had driven through Ferrari's hometown of Maranello with his parents, trying desperately to catch a glimpse of his hero, Michael Schumacher, lapping the same track through the fences.

Now, the moment belongs to him.

On the surface, anything seems possible for Vettel and Ferrari. But beneath the surface, the cracks have already begun to appear because the Ferrari he's now driving for is very different to the one he agreed to join.

That's how the scene is set for the first episode of The Race's brand-new podcast, F1 Rewind.

On each episode, Edd Straw and Mark Hughes will be rewinding to a particular topic, event, or person from F1 history.

They'll be revisiting some historic events, but with a fresh perspective, analysing them from a new angle that wasn't necessarily available at the time.

They’re kicking off the series by unpicking Vettel's rollercoaster Ferrari stint. We've picked out part of their conversation below but you can listen to the first episode or watch it now.

And those of you in The Race Members' Club got early access to this episode. If you'd like similar perks in future - as well as tonnes of bonus content - make sure you're signed up.

The uncoordinated announcement

The episode starts at the beginning with the announcement on the Saturday of the 2014 Japanese GP that four-time world champion Vettel was leaving Red Bull.

Straw recalls: "It was the Saturday of the Japanese Grand Prix. So that was the October 4 2014.

"This press release landed announcing that Sebastian Vettel was leaving Red Bull - although in classic press release fashion, they slightly buried the lead because the title was New Team Driver Line Up For 2015 [in reference to Daniil Kvyat joining Daniel Ricciardo at the team].

"It was actually seven weeks before Ferrari announced anything about [Fernando] Alonso's departure."

Hughes picks up the story: "I'd completely forgotten that Ferrari just stayed schtum on it for all those weeks when it was obvious where he was going.

"Just unusual the way it was done, it was totally uncoordinated, wasn't it? Basically, Red Bull just wanted to get it out there as soon as it had happened, because they didn't want to have to deal with all the speculation that was inevitably going to come.

"[Red Bull team principal] Christian Horner had been taken by surprise by it. He got a knock on the door and it was Seb saying, 'I want to trigger the release clause', which the rest of the paddock didn't know about, incidentally.

"Fernando Alonso didn't know about it, nor did his manager, Flavio Briatore, as they were trying to negotiate with Ferrari about extending his contract. So that caught everybody on the hop.

"I think both Christian Horner and the management of Red Bull and [then-Red Bull motorsport advisor] Helmut Marko thought, 'Well, we don't want to be dealing with the flack that's going to come with this for the next few weeks, so we're not going to bother waiting for Ferrari; we're just going to say: Seb's leaving us'."

The timing of the talks

It's often assumed Vettel essentially fled to Ferrari when his new Red Bull team-mate Daniel Ricciardo got the better of him as then defending champion Vettel struggled to adapt to the new generation F1 cars in 2014.

But as the podcast explains, that doesn't align with the actual timeline, which began the previous year.

"This whole thing you can trace back even to the start of the [2014] season - well, pre-season in fact, because Sebastian Vettel had a meeting with [then-Ferrari chairman] Luca di Montezemolo," explains Straw.

"And they discussed this move in principle at this stage - there was later a pre-contract signed - but basically the agreement was, 'Well, if Red Bull aren't that good this year and I don't win the championship, I think I'd like to go to Ferrari, please'.

"That was really the serious start. There'd been discussions before. It wasn't coming from nothing. But that meeting seems to be the real start, where it turns from a hypothetical - a thing I think everyone expected to happen one day - into something that would actually surprise us and happen probably a year before we were anticipating."

Hughes adds: "It was already quite seriously discussed - not the terms, but the idea of it - in 2013, so before the 2014 season had even started.

"So the idea that because Daniel Ricciardo had outperformed Seb, Seb wanted an escape, that doesn't hold up because it was already being discussed well before the wheels had even turned in 2014.

"Subsequently I did an interview with Luca di Montezemolo, and asked him to talk me through it. Basically he'd said that he had the sense that Alonso, although he was a fantastic driver, in the way that he spoke that when he did well, it was because it was Alonso and when he didn't do well, it was because of the team.

"He'd got a bit tired of this and he didn't think it was very healthy for the team. So he'd had a conversation with Michael Schumacher and said, 'Look, I want to recreate what we had with you. How do you think I should go about this?'

“Michael had said, 'Well, the guy you need here to build everything around is Seb: Sebastian Vettel'. And Luca didn't take much convincing of that.

"So that was all part of it. The three key people were Schumacher, Vettel and di Montezemolo. Schumacher and Vettel, of course, [were] close friends. You can be sure that they were talking to each other. Then, of course, Michael has his skiing accident [in December 2013].

"But that was all part of the general discussion. It was very much in the minds of Luca di Montezemolo and Seb that this was going to happen.

"Now, the timing of it wasn't certain because his contract with Red Bull went to the end of 2015. But there was a release clause if he wasn't in a certain position by a certain stage of the season and the last moment that he could trigger it by informing them was the weekend of the Japanese Grand Prix, hence the knock at Christian Horner's door."

Three drivers into two seats

Red Bull's announcement caught pretty much everyone by surprise, but it also spelled trouble for Alonso - who was considering whether he wanted to go the end of his contract and had been speaking to other teams.

"Ferrari have that problem, don't they? They've decided they want Vettel if they can get him. They think they probably can, although it's going to take a little time to play out," says Straw.

"They've got Kimi Raikkonen under contract to the end of 2015 and Alonso to the end of 2016. So it was three drivers for two seats.

"[This is] unbeknownst to Alonso, in fact, who thinks he's got this fantastic hand he's been playing for months, Alonso thinks he's in this brilliant position. And this is all going on in the background.

"Meanwhile Ferrari are having a nightmare in 2014. They've been far too late starting that engine project: 2014 is the first year of the 1.6-litre V6 turbos, so they're miles behind on that, they're nowhere. You've got Ferrari struggling. You've got Alonso doing all the Alonso tricks, my favourite being that sarcastic arm raised over the line when he finishes ninth in Bahrain. And then, of course, he claims, 'Oh, I was just celebrating a good team effort'. But, of course, it was pure sarcasm, which tells you where Alonso is.

"Alonso is running around in the background. He's trying to get in at Mercedes. There's a little bit of talking going on with McLaren-Honda as well in the background.

"But Alonso obviously believes he is the guy for Ferrari. And he has been since joining in 2010: almost won the 2010 championship, almost won the 2012 championship. And then 2014, he can't win. It's Ferrari's first winless season in just over a decade.

"So he thinks he's got this brilliant hand that he's playing all the way through that year.

"Unbeknownst [to Alonso], like pretty much most of us, didn't realise there was this release clause."

Hughes adds that di Montezemolo had instructed short-lived Ferrari team principal Marco Mattiacci "to just string him [Alonso] along for as long as possible because what might have happened was that Seb didn't trigger the release clause or wasn't in a position to trigger the release clause. In which case they would have needed Alonso to stay".

"It was all in a state of flux and Ferrari knew what was going on and Alonso didn't, so that was an unfair negotiation really. Fernando's thinking he's got all the information and he didn't have. And that was very much part of why Ferrari and Alonso had sort of broken down. They were no longer a unit," Hughes adds.

"Somebody who worked there said to me, he said in his first year in 2010, he [Alonso] was absolutely part of the team and it felt fantastic, like they were really building something. And when we lost in that title finale with the wrong strategy call, he said that's when it broke.

"It broke almost from that moment. From then on, everything that was wrong was a team's fault and everything went right was Fernando's merit. And it just broke down and it just got too wearing and it just was felt that we're going to have to refresh here, we're going to need to press the reset button."

The only silver lining for Alonso - who subsequently made his ill-fated McLaren-Honda switch - when he found out was that Ferrari had broken a clause in his contract that said he had to be informed if the team was speaking to other drivers.

Hughes says: "I don't know if he got all of his Ferrari salary, but most of his Ferrari salary got paid in 2015, even though he was driving for McLaren and getting paid by McLaren as well."

That's how the Vettel-Ferrari story started. But there's even more to it than that, including the fact that De Montezemolo would be gone before Vettel turned a wheel at Ferrari, as part of a sequence of events that might even have sown some of the seeds of Vettel's later title failures.

Edd and Mark analysed all of that in depth in the full F1 Rewind episode, so make sure you listen to it here.

And look out for more episodes of F1 Rewind being released soon.