He fought back tears, then admitted he was struggling to find the right thing to say. His speech veered seemingly at random from the inevitable congratulations for his team, through recollections of his time with his family as a young boy, to almost philosophical discourses on the nature of his success and the wonderful contradictions of the country in which he sealed it.
Vettel has a right to feel "overwhelmed", as he put it.
To win four titles in a row is a magnificent achievement, and statistically it puts Vettel in rarefied company.
Only three other drivers have won that many - Juan Manuel Fangio, Alain Prost and Michael Schumacher - and only Fangio and Schumacher have won four in a row, as Vettel now has.
At the age of just 26, in the best team in F1, the sky is the limit for Vettel in terms of the statistics he could potentially rack up.
He is a likeable man and a rare talent, who has achieved great things in a fantastic car for the last five years. He works tirelessly with his team to create a car tailored to his skills, consistently does the job in qualifying, controls grands prix expertly from the front, makes few mistakes, and can race superbly, too, as he proved in his victory on Sunday.
He is, without doubt, an all-time great driver. But just how great remains an open question.
As the main architect of Red Bull's success, their genius design chief Adrian Newey, said on Sunday, statistics are not the only measure of greatness.
If they were, the likes of Jim Clark (two titles), Gilles Villeneuve and Stirling Moss (no titles) would not consistently figure in lists of greatest-ever drivers, and Schumacher (seven) would be considered more than twice as good as Ayrton Senna (three). Which he isn't.
The big debate is whether Fernando Alonso or Lewis Hamilton would do as good a job as Vettel in a Red Bull, even beat him? Who, in other words, is the best driver of this era?
As Hamilton's team-mate Nico Rosberg says: "For sure it would help his [Vettel's] perception if he had - and nothing against Mark [Webber], who is a fantastic driver and a great person - a Fernando calibre driver next to him."
You can think yourself round in knots over this.
Webber is a world-class driver, but the only team-mate Vettel has had of that calibre. And the only other top driver the Australian has had as a team-mate is Rosberg, back in 2006 at Williams.
That was Rosberg's first season in F1, and he was on average 0.15secs slower than Webber in qualifying. This year, Vettel is on average 0.29secs quicker than Webber in qualifying and Rosberg is 0.01secs slower than Hamilton.
Cross-compare those numbers and they suggest Vettel is 0.28secs a lap quicker than Hamilton, who was marginally faster than Alonso when they were team-mates in 2007.
But no-one knows how valid are these comparisons between team-mates across the years, with different circumstances, different types of cars and tyres requiring different driving styles, drivers being at different stages of their careers and so on.
Webber has driven against Vettel in the same team, watched how he works, seen the computer traces of his laps, for five years now, but he still believes Alonso is better.
That's an opinion apparently honestly held as a motorsport fan who happens to be an F1 driver. After all, if he said Vettel was the best, it would make Webber himself look better.