Saudi Arabia Review:

 

Best driver:

Worst driver:

Best team:

Worst team:

Best overtake:

Worst overtake:

Best moment:

Worst moment:

Best thing about the race:

Worst thing about the race:

 

And the race in a sentence

Best driver: Perez

Worst driver: Sargeant

Best team: Red Bull

Worst team: McLaren

Best overtake: Alonso on Perez

Worst overtake: Verstappen on Hamilton

Best moment: Alonso takes the lead

Worst moment: Alonso losing third place

Best thing about the race: Perez matched Verstappen for pace

Worst thing about the race: Uneventful

 

And the race in a sentence: It's Checo time

Alonso has had his third place reinstated.

FIA are an absolute bunch of clowns. New levels of incompetency every season...

Best driver: Perez [he runs the streets]

Worst driver: Bottas

Best team: Red Bull

Worst team: Williams

Best overtake: Stroll on Sainz [this was tasty!]

Worst overtake: can't remember any bad ones

Best moment: Alonso taking the lead

Worst moment: Many, the ridiculously OTT safety car when it was at VSC at most, the sheer stupidity of the stewards to not know whether a mechanic touched Alonso's car, the original 5-sec penalty in the first place when no advantage could possibly be gained

Best thing about the race: Perez matched Verstappen's pace at the end so there's a 1% chance rather than a 0% chance this could be another Merc 2016 season (no it won't be who am I kidding)

Worst thing about the race: By Jeddah's standards it was very uneventful

 

And the race in a sentence: Perez again proves he's king of the streets, it looks a tall order for any Red Bull defeats

FIA are an absolute bunch of clowns. New levels of incompetency every season...

This is more the fault of the teams and F1 than the FIA tbh. They previously informed the FIA that there was an agreement that no part of the car should be touched whilst serving a penalty, which the stewards then applied , however it turns out that the teams hadn't all agreed, that there was no consensus and there were several previous instances of teams touching a car without incurring punishment.

 

The FIA then were forced to retract the penalty and have announced they will tighten up on this area. If the teams had stated in the past there was disagreement the FIA would have looked at this earlier.

But why is it down to the teams to decide on an agreement? The FIA's job is to enforce the rules, not to let teams pick and choose what they want to be enforced. Either you can touch a car when serving a penalty or you can't, it's very black and white.

 

Looking into it more, it seems like it was down to the wording more than anything. The previous instances were all where the front jack was used to help position the car in the pit box, whereas Aston used the rear jack but there was no wording specifying only the front jack can be used to touch the car.

But why is it down to the teams to decide on an agreement? The FIA's job is to enforce the rules,

 

 

That last bit is spot on - the FIA are like police for all Motorsports but Formula One are the government and as such sets a lot of it's own rules as would NASCAR or Karting. F1 would set a rule many about other things such as car width, weight etc that would not be relevant to other disciplines like Indycar which has its own rules. The FIA stewards act when a team highlights an infraction (in this case Mercedes drew their attention to it) and it is passed to them to adjudicate but the information the FIA stewards had was not fully correct

I think i would feel hard done by if I was Alpine having had a clusterstorm of escalating penalties, one of which was for touching a car in a tiny fraction of a second early and here we have a team getting away with it. I’m just asking for consistency from the FIA & F1.

@1637760958582910977

 

 

Currently on 79, if Max is on the podium for every remaining race this season he will achieve number 100 at Abu Dhabi and therefore break the record for shortest interval.

Best driver: Sergio Perez

Worst driver: Valtteri Bottas

Best team: Red Bull

Worst team: McLaren

Best overtake: Stroll on Sainz

Worst overtake: Can't think of one

Best moment: Alonso taking the lead

Worst moment: The Alonso penalty drama.

Best thing about the race: The midfield battle for the final point.

Worst thing about the race: Quite processional.

 

And the race in a sentence: The Yawn in Arabia.

Currently on 79, if Max is on the podium for every remaining race this season he will achieve number 100 at Abu Dhabi and therefore break the record for shortest interval.

 

These type of records always favour modern drivers due to the amount of races there now are, same with the most wins in a season record. Prost got 106 in 202 GP (199 starts) across 13 full seasons, podium #100 coming in race #194. Max is likely to have a comparable record there, but his race #202 will come before than end of his 10th season.

 

Yeah I'm not a huge fan of time-based achievement comparisons either, better to compare using races (but even that has limitations of course, as you an rack up impressive stats if you have an amazing car for one season whereas back in the 50s you'd need 3+ seasons to match it).

It's all about percentages. They're the only stats worth looking at (and they still require context).

 

So many people these days will say Hamilton is the greatest because of his tally of wins or years of dominance but his most dominant year was 2020 with him winning a 'mere' 64.7% of the races

 

Compare this to -

Ascari 1952 75%

Schumacher 2004 72.2%

Clark 1963 70%

Vettel 2013 68.4%

Verstappen 2022 68.1%

Fangio 1954 66.6%

Schumacher 2002 64.7%

 

Of course Mercedes has had ridiculous dominance that out-peaks Lewis' rate but the man himself hasn't utterly trounced a team mate as much as people think. He's also been blessed with supreme reliability by comparison to previous eras (and even some team mates).

 

 

 

Incidentally, the best example I can think of right now, of a driver destroying a well regarded team mate is Alonso vs Raikkonen in 2014

Or destroying Massa in 2012.

 

Hamilton's best season in terms of destroying a teammate was 2018 imo. 161 points clear of Bottas who finished fifth in the standings.

 

Vettel's 2013 season he also had zero bad luck and it all went to Webber.

All true but I wouldn't say that either Massa, Webber or Bottas were anywhere near as highly rated as Kimi was at the time. They were never top tier whereas Raikkonen was seen as such until his comeback

Pirelli have announced their intention to continue on as the official tyre supplier to Formula 1 for the 2025 season onwards, with the sport having recently put out a tender inviting applicants for the deal.

 

The Italian manufacturer took over from Bridgestone in supplying Formula 1’s tyres from 2011, when they were initially brought in on a remit of creating tyres which would degrade more quickly than their predecessors, prompting more pit-stops and a variety of strategies as a result.

Albon's doing a super job with Williams. Eighth place on the grid.

Well that was absolutely bonkers. Must have been the Masi effect...