The father. The steward. The standard everything at Lanzetti Racing is still measured against.
"Nothing is more valuable than a good name."
Matteo Lanzetti
It is not a slogan the team wrote for a website. It is the rule Sebastian grew up under, repeated in workshops and paddocks long before there was a team to put it on.
Matteo runs the steward and coaching side of Lanzetti Racing alongside Sebastian: race-weekend conduct, officialdom, and the guidance that moves a driver from grassroots karting up through the X30 and Rotax Max ladders towards single seaters and main circuit racing.
He is the calm voice between sessions, and the one who will tell a driver the truth about a move nobody else saw.
A trained elettrauto in the Italian tradition - a master of vehicle electronics and systems - leading technical operations at CMC Autobody in Germiston.
The same hands that repair a car properly on a Tuesday prepare a kart properly on a Saturday. Nothing leaves either bench half done.
The kart is checked before the driver is pushed. Speed that arrives on an unprepared machine is borrowed, and it always gets called in.
How you speak to a rival, an official and a marshal is part of your record. It is read long after the lap times are forgotten.
Trophies are the visible part. The name you leave on a grid is the part that keeps opening doors years later.
A career is built one clean weekend at a time. No shortcuts, no theatre, no result worth a bad name.
Sebastian is the Attack Coach: the line, the data, the last tenth. Matteo is the Motorsport Steward: the preparation, the conduct, the long view. Drivers who come to Lanzetti Racing get both, from the same two people, every weekend.
Before there was a championship or a British F4 seat, there was a father on the spanners at six in the morning. That has not changed.
An Italian family name carried into a South African paddock and kept clean for three generations. The gloves come down off the wall in Il Caffe from time to time, but the standard behind them never does.
Bring your driver to a session run by the two of them - Sebastian on the line and the data, Matteo on the preparation and the conduct.
