Shelton

Nice win. Go Lions.

I want to say I find it interesting that two drivers of the same team can be so consistently first and second relative to each, but it certainly makes sense that driver skill matters. What I love about this sport is that the engineering seems to far outweigh the driver skill. I would like to see merc figure out their shit, and maybe they are, if only to get a real sense of how good Russell and Hamilton are relative to each other when driving a top tier car. It could be likely that Russell is better driving the junk but Lewis will be better once the car is better. Is George Russell challenging for the world championship if they were racing under last year’s regs? This year has been pretty fun, but I’m already looking forward to next year after everyone catches up to the baseline. What does the driver championship race look like today if max simply finished those two races in the position he was in?

That’s amazing.

Only 175 bucks for a mini helmet replica, too.

So, Max had a grand slam this past weekend, which is interesting of course, and Charles had one earlier this year. I wonder how a sprint weekend could affect figuring that achievement. It didn’t matter this past weekend because Max won pole on Friday and then won P1 on Saturday. They made a big deal this past offseason to make it that finishing first in qualifying earned the title of pole position regardless of sprint finish. If Max had finished second in qualifying but won the sprint, and Sunday played out the same, would that be considered a grand slam if he didn’t officially have the title of pole position?

I agree with this. And didn’t checo just barely come out ahead of Charles after pitting on the following lap? Whatever risk Charles took, it forced RB to take the same one a lap later and then defend. Credit to checo for doing a good job there. Charles had just set back to back fastest laps right before he crashed and was in DRS range. I figured Ferrari were just biding their time until trying to overtake on the final lap. If they did it any sooner RB would have taken it right back.

Yeah with Walt in el Camino it was fine.

I stayed up to watch SNL and then the race, but couldn’t stay alert through the whole thing and seemed to wake up every 15 laps or so when there was a yellow flag. I’ll have to rewatch today, but I really like Leclerc and it’s fun to see him having so much success.

I’m very interested to see how they handle what is basically two long DRS zones with a couple turns in the middle. If you get DRS at the first checkpoint do you keep it through the next two zones? And looking at the second checkpoint before turn 13, it really feels like you want to be in second heading into that turn. Anyone else staying up / waking up for qualifying at 1am? I think this will just be an early morning on-demand watch before breakfast type of thing.

I wonder if they are performing even beyond what they envisioned. It seems like overtaking is almost too easy now. Obviously every race is different, but it didn’t take long for Max to decide to just wait until the second DRS zone. That said, Charles had the same opportunity after that and didn’t get it done, so fair play to both. Definitely exciting. I think it may have been a blessing in disguise for Red Bull when Checo got unlucky on his pit stop decision, allowing max to move ahead and go one on one with Charles.

It would have been interesting if Max picked up on that in the second of those laps and waited until the second straight to overtake. The Ferrari pace would have probably made that a moot strategy overall.