F2 Sprint just finished. I missed the chaos at the beginning. Ollie came in P8. And there was sassy team radio here as well. Except from the racing engineer:
First Paul was watching "his friend Ollie" with big eyes in Qualifying and now he got him a good luck muffin/bun/cinnamon roll with a candle to celebrate his first race?? 😭😭😭
Word on the street (*Sky F1 Germany gossip) has it that Helmut Marko is going to be fired (this race weekend) 😶
When asked about it he said that he doesn't want to talk about it, but he will have a meeting tomorrow with Oliver Mintzlaff (Red Bull CEO). He also said that he has to see if he even wants to continue working there.
I don't get what Prema is doing in F2 like..? 🤷♀️
First they qualify in P17 + P18 which is horrible, of course, but last year the first 2 races weren't great either (they finished P15 + 17 in the Sprint and P14 + DNF in the feature race) and they still only missed out both championships by a few points.
I thought maybe they just need this first weekend like last year to get the finetuning right and next weekend will be better.
Then the sprint starts and the drivers don't have any pace (not surprising) and they suddenly pit Kimi after half a race?? And one lap after that Ollie as well?? They didn't even show it OR commented on it (at least in my stream).
Then first Kimi and the lap after Ollie set fastest lap, which wasn't surprising either as they had the freshest tyres. But it was a 1.45 sth laptime, while all other drivers were driving a 1.49 or 1.50 at that point and they CONTINUED to keep that pace (well dropping slightly of course, as the tyres wore off) for the remainder of the race!! Like how???
I think I checked in Lap 19/23 and they both still drove a 1.48, still 1-2 seconds faster than the rest of the grid. In the last lap, Kimi still had a 1.48 laptime while ALL other drivers (except for Fittipaldi who just pitted the lap before) had a laptime btw 1.50 and 1.53.
Like where did Prema suddenly get that pace from??? I'm no expert, I dont know if I'm missing something?? Are those laptimes like normal if you pitted halfway through the race? It just seemed so fast, they were making up 30 seconds of lost time after the pitstops and still overtook like 4 more drivers who all had an additional 6 second gap! I would have loved to see them race for another 8 laps or so, just to see how much further they could've going up in the order😅
Okay sorry about my rant, that's it for now 😅 I really hope Prema can just unlock that same pace straight away for the feature race and I can just watch Kimi and Ollie climb up the ladder into the points 🤞😌