Roscoe, icon of the “F1” movie and Lewis Hamilton’s beloved bulldog, passed away. Sending him love and light.
Now to the nitty-gritty. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start, literally. McLaren finally decided to stop meddling with the drivers, but is it too late for that?
I appreciate that the team didn’t interfere with Lando Norris’ aggressive move on Oscar Piastri. I’m rooting for Piastri to win the championship, but the move was perfectly legal. Two things can be true:
- Norris’ move was hard racing, which is good. It means he’s hungry for the title — finally. The team had no real reason to intervene on this occasion. Piastri still leads the Driver’s Championship, and the Constructors’ Championship is now in the bag.
- McLaren had very little reason to intervene in the past — for example in Monza, but they did anyway, setting a precedent of “fairness.” That’s nonsense by the way, fairness is impossible when someone winning means someone else loses. McLaren’s attempt to micromanage the championship battle with “papaya rules” and unnecessary swaps, often laced with threats of losing the team’s support, shows how unprepared the team was for Piastri to be this good so soon. He reserved the right to complain, however annoying it is, because he’s often given the short end of the stick.
If McLaren was making decisions to support both drivers equally in their quest for a drivers’ title, playing it safe with racing each other, why should that change? The team can’t have it both ways — both drivers can’t share the title, so treating them like they can is a strange management strategy. My take on the issue is that McLaren should’ve let the drivers duke it out many races and swaps ago once it became clear the team would retain the Constructors’ Championship.
McLaren are the Constructors’ Champions for 2025 — a very deserved title for the engineers, strategists and all the people that moved the team from the back of the pack to the cream of the crop.
Moving on, I’ve been saying George Russell’s season has been quietly successful. Well, in Singapore, he was anything but. Russell looked up the meaning of Singapore and decided to roar. I mean, come on. His pole position lap was flawless. The last time a driver flung their car around Marina Bay Circuit that well was in 2018, when Hamilton defied the supercomputer’s predictions of the perfect lap time.
After Russell’s last lap crash in 2023 and his barrier bang in this year’s first free practice session, a comeback like that is something to be applauded. He came, he saw and he conquered. This is up there for me as one of the best race wins of the season. He controlled the race with an ease I’ve never seen from him. It was fantastic from Mercedes all around. Toto Wolff, what are you waiting for? You wanted a team leader, and now you’ve got one.
Now to everyone’s favorite segment: How did things go wrong at Ferrari? Place your bets: Brake failure? Poor strategy? No pace? Crash? Engine failure? Lift and coast?
If you guessed poor strategy and no pace this weekend, you’re wrong! Ferrari executed a beautiful strategy with Hamilton and seemingly had the pace to hang with the heavy hitters.
The answers are brake failure and lift and coast. It looked like Hamilton might make it into the top five after chasing down an almost 20-second gap to catch Andrea Kimi Antonelli … until his brakes caught fire.
What are the brakes on this car made of? Hopes and dreams? Ultimately, the Ferrari cars swapped back, putting Hamilton in seventh in front of Fernando Alonso. Because of the aforementioned brake failure, he cut some corners (literally) to stop himself from crashing. But if you listened to Alonso’s radio messages, you’d think Hamilton went and plucked each of his mustache hairs individually.
Alonso got his wish in the end, because Hamilton received a five-second penalty for “leaving the track without justifiable reason multiple times.” Not sure how brake failure is not justifiable, considering he lost almost 40 seconds over one lap, but that’s neither here nor there. This promoted Alonso to seventh, big whoop. By the way, these two used to fight for championships — Alonso just never won one over Hamilton.
Charles Leclerc’s race wasn’t much better — he had to lift off of the throttle (lift and coast) for almost every lap so his brakes wouldn’t blow up. This means that he couldn’t fully exploit the pace the car apparently had (re: Hamilton closing the gap to Antonelli).
Ferrari’s driver lineup is far too good for this to be the car and state of the team. Engineer Riccardo Adami and Hamilton are not a winning combination at this point in time, and they might never be. Leclerc’s dream of becoming a champion in red seems more distant with each season. Something has got to give. I suggest management starts making tough calls.
Moving on to the actual broadcast of this race, I need the TV director to understand that the driver who wins the race crosses the line first. That’s obvious, I know, but it means the race continues behind him for drivers who have not been lapped. We want to see the action, not the winning driver’s reconnaissance lap nor his girlfriend.
The whole Hamilton-Alonso debacle wasn’t shown on the broadcast because we were too busy looking at the fans in the grandstands. We also missed Carlos Sainz Jr.’s multiple overtakes in the closing stages of the race because we were watching Norris trail Max Verstappen as he had been for several laps at that point. I don’t watch the races to see drivers’ girlfriends — let them be! I don’t care which celebrity is in the paddock! Truthfully, I only care that I’m not in the paddock. I want to see action on the track. Let’s see the winner celebrate and hear their radio message, and then tune us back into the drivers still on track. Please!
I’m excited for Round 19 in Texas because I’ve heard everything’s bigger there.
