I’m surprised at how many folk say, “He’s an asshole.” Never seemed to detract from Tiger’s popularity.
I’m with ya. But when Tiger’s an asshole, he’s not going to run you off into a wall at 180mph where you might burst into flames.
Well, actually, now that I think about that… 
Pretty fed up with the Red Flag Bullshit. Put on Wet tires and race. What is this? Indycar?
I don’t know what Max Verstappen is like in person, but whenever I see the opening credits before a race, and they show all the drivers, I think “that guy has the second-most smackable face in auto racing.”
Just before the red flag, at least one team chose to put full wet tires on one of their cars, rather than the intermediate tires. It seemed like that turned out to be the correct call, but it turned out not to help them. I think teams can change tires during a red flag in F1. In this particular case, I thought one of the commentators said that all cars were required to be on intermediates for the restart.
I wouldn’t mind seeing F1 go to a rule that cars can’t be worked on during a red flag, not even to change tires. Does anyone know why they don’t?
In the car. From everything I’ve noticed, if it’s not about on-track racing (and a few times doing sim races), Verstappen is fairly personable, though less so with some of the media. His feud with Drive to Survive has been pretty well-noted.
On the track, he’s a raging bastard.
T1 incidents were pretty tame because of the barrier, but 4 cars went off there in short order, including a 7 time world champion. As we’ve seen at, say, Japan last year (Gasly), it’s still possible that drivers make mistakes while pushing to catch up to the safety car. It wouldn’t have been safe for the marshals to retrieve Zhou’s car until the entire field had been packed up behind the SC, which would have taken several laps. Another several laps for the repairs to the barrier and there would have been a good chance the race would have ended under the safety car. Nobody wants that.
Throwing the red flag was the safest thing to do while still allowing some good racing at the end.
It’s probably only a matter of time before F1 catches up to the rest of the racing world in this regard. I guess the rule exists to allow for setup changes due to changing weather conditions, but because of the way it’s written it opens the door a lot more. “Safety” is an aspect here but if a car isn’t safe to go out they can do a lap after the red flag and come in.
There is an element of what I call “what if it’s my favorite driver?” here. If the guy you’re rooting for drives through whatever debris field came from the red-flag incident and picks up damage through no fault of their own…
Verstappen is a petulant asshole, but that doesn’t distinguish him from most of the all-time greats. Prost, Piquet, Senna,* Mansell, Vettel, Alonso, Schumacher - all assholes at times to some degree. Hamilton is about as close as we’ve had to a nice multiple world champion since the 70s at least, and even he isn’t above whining to his engineer about bad strategy calls and the like. If Verstappen just kept his head down and drove we’d call him boring or robotic. In fact, that’s what a lot of people said about Raikonnen before they realized he was too hung over to talk. Actually, come to think of it, Hakkinen was supposedly a nice guy too.
*I was the world’s biggest Senna fan long before it was cool, to the point where I didn’t believe he purposely ran Prost off the road even after he admitted it, so it takes a lot for me to say that.
Great qualifying in Monza. I wonder how Ferrari will manage to fuck up the race? I guess I’ll just have to wait…
I’m going with Leclerc locking up into T1 and shoving Sainz into the barriers with him.
That was my first thought, but too obvious. I’m going with some kind of massive screw up in the pits. Like putting wet tires on by mistake or mix-matched sets.
Predictions: Max will take the lead by the end of the first lap, Perez will jump Hamilton in the pits, Albon will get driver the day.
They’ll pit during a safety car and put on square tires.
Nice touch for Coulthard to drop “cunning linguist” in to the commentary
Anyone else have a problem with their stream cutting out? That’s twice for me now. Fuck it, I’m gonna go mow the lawn.
Exciting race despite the obvious outcome.
That was a good watch. Hamilton’s disappointing qualifying performances in the last two races have at least allowed him to do lots of overtaking.
Glad someone else noticed that.
And I was sooooo close on having the correct prediction. And right after Leclerc’s engineer said “Nothing risky.”
I woke up real early, right about the time the DVR was kicking in to record the race, to heavy rain that normally gives me a Total Signal Loss. But I got the whole race, thankfully. Fun to watch. Two cars full-speed through Curva Grande inches apart is quite thrilling.
Possibly the best race of the year except for the obvious result at the front of the race. Just think, if you were to remove Verstappen’s results from this season it would have probably been the most exciting and unpredictable season of all time.
The Alpha looked great with the Tri-Color tail. They need to keep that, like everyone said.