#nico is not a good driver and hasn't been and if he ever was it was years ago | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

keepthedelta · 7 months

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I just read up your post on merc not favoring nico throughout his career. With all the british bias sky/any other medias had against him back in the day, it's definitely interesting when nico decided to join them, always made me wonder how he felt about all of that. Also, did he really sign more than 100 million euros in 2016? That's some insane negotiation skill, considering he hasn't been a wdc 😭

the thing about relationships between sports people and the media is that it's inherently weird. because yes, these people often talk shit about you on the television, but you also often see them more than you see your own family. you share flights with them, and meals, and you see them not just at work, but also in airports and train stations and restaurants and hotels. and both sides need each other. the media need drivers and team personnel to want to talk to them (and sometimes leak them information) and the drivers and teams need the media for coverage, advertising, and to drive certain narratives. and for both sides, the people that you are on camera may not always be who you are off camera, and there is a certain recognition of that.

for nico, while i would say that while the british media treated him fairly terribly during 2014-2016, there were still moments where they acknowledged how good he was. there was this very odd phase in the monza-suzuka section of the 2016 calendar, where it was looking increasingly likely that nico was going to win the championship, and sky were suddenly nice about nico. they wrote articles about how wonderful nico was as a person and said it was a shame that people didn't get to see that side of nico (even though they were the ones portraying him in a certain way), they did a review of the hybrid era and recognised that nico had had more bad luck across the era than lewis, (although lewis had probably had slightly worse luck in 2016) and where earlier race wins like bahrain, china and russia (where he began on the front row and then led all the way to the end) were described as boring and unchallenged, race wins like monza and japan (which were almost identical to the earlier wins) were described as faultless and perfect. even when they were being terrible to him, there were moments that were good.

additionally, a lot of the british hate towards nico only began in 2014. prior to that, coverage was largely positive. nico was driving terrible cars, but he was driving them incredibly well. he dragged some of the shittiest williams cars in their history to places that they should not have been, including onto the podium. i would have to check, but i'm pretty sure that during his time at williams, nico was their only podium finisher. he absolutely destroyed his teammates (the only teammate he never beat in his career was mark webber, who was his teammate during his rookie year, when they were driving a car that spent more time on fire than it did racing), and when he went to mercedes he beat michael schumacher pretty convincingly (only schumi teammate to ever beat him btw). before he became a threat to lewis, the british media were actually quite complimentary about him. so for nico, it's a question of three years of negative coverage versus eight years of pretty good coverage (personally i would still have told them to fuck off).

there's also the fact that nico does triple duty for sky, as he works for sky germany and sky italy too, often in the same weekend. so sky are willing to pay him essentially three times to do one job, which seems like a pretty good deal to me, and i don't think the german or italian coverage of him was ever quite as harsh as the british media, so that might also be a factor. he clearly enjoys what he does, he gets to show up in his little linen beach outfits, say whatever he likes, and leave as the paddock implodes because he's just dropped information that the fia didn't want anyone to know about. truly an icon.

as for the contract extension, yeah it was insane. i think it may have even been for as much as 137 million euros, almost 70 million per year, which is a legitimately insane amount of money for any driver, let alone one who has never won a wdc. as i said, i think nico actually had quite a lot of power/leverage when it came to signing the contract because of what was happening internally at mercedes at the time. also, back then, a lot of merc's biggest sponsors, hugo boss, thomas sabo, etc. were actually nico sponsors, and if he went to ferrari, they would have gone with him, so there was definitely a financial incentive to keep him, but still, georg nolte and gerhard berger definitely earned their money in those negotiations

#ask #anon #nico rosberg

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hyacinthsdiamonds · 2 years

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For your new ask game: Which past driver would you want to meet the most?

I would have to say I'd love to meet my McLaren boys Mika and Jenson.

Jenson (outside of Lando, my fam and I do love Lando too) is the probably the only British driver I remember my family ever supporting lmao. Like we were a Schumi and Seb house first, family second but we always liked Jenson lmao. He seems like a good laugh and he never fails to make me smile. He's one of a handful of people on sky sports I actually like. Also the video of him after his last race where he was drunk because he was drinking for almost two hours straight after dnfing and David Coulthard is trying to interview interviewing him has to be one of the funniest post race interviews ever, he was absolutely hammered 😂. "Congratulations to Nico!.... *turns to DC & whispers forgetting that the microphone will still pick up whatever he says 😭* it was Nico who won, right?"

Mika is such an underrated wdc it's ridiculous, I could talk about it for days. I've seen him race while rewatching old races (I'm an '01 baby so I don't remember a time when he was actually on the grid sadly) but my first proper exposure to him was ROC this year and he seems so genuinely lovely. I've watched more races and interviews etc since and he like Jenson hasn't failed to make me smile.

I just realized after typing all this that Kimi qualifies too now and I would love to meet him. He's been on the grid almost my entire life, it's weird without him. I do miss my favorite ice man. Plus he'd have some incredible stories and his comedic timing is brilliant.

#f1 #formula 1 #ask game #jenson button #kimi räikkönen #kimi raikkonen #mika hakkinen #thank you for the ask!

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inappropriatestork · 2 years

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would you mind explaining what happened in F1?? I don't follow it myself but I follow people who do so I'm kinda lost and confused, I did try reading articles about it but i have no idea who anyone is or what the rules are (all I know is car go in circle very fast) so that hasn't really helped.

It's a long story and I'm probably not the best to explain it as I only followed today's race (and the rest except last weekend) on Twitter and didn't actually watch, I have a terrible memory,*and* tbh I'm definitely biased here as I was definitely rooting for one of the major players and loathe the other. But I'll try!

Warning: this is long and there's uh, some a lot of anti-Red Bull sentiment

So this year's two title contenders are (Sir) Lewis Hamilton (7x champion, equaling the all-time record, first and only Black driver) of Mercedes and Max Verstappen (promoted to F1 and then to a big team very young, wildly hyped, obviously talented but shall we say, hot-headed, some race wins but no titles till now) of Red Bull Racing.

This is the first year in a LONG time there's been a real fight for the title. Mercedes have won every year since 2014, and all but one of those was Lewis. 2016 was his former teammate, Nico Rosberg, who was pretty much the last and only driver to really challenge Lewis. Some people claim Lewis's success is just due to the having the best car, and obviously the Merc is very good, but even his own teammates in the same car have never been able to reach his level.

But this year Red Bull have been very strong and Max gave Lewis a real fight and in fact led the championship for the majority of the season if I remember right. There have been some clashes throughout the season, most of which I can't remember.

A few other people and things to know: At RBR, we have team principal Christian Horner. Some fans call him Karen. He likes to complain. Red Bull are always victims, always being discriminated against, and never get away with with anything, according to him. This makes a lot of people dislike him/them because the facts often seem to be pretty much the opposite. Red Bull have claimed all season what poor beleaguered underdogs they are, despite leading the championship for much of it and getting away with quite a bit. Red Bull also are widely disliked, at least on Tumblr, for their overall attitude towards their drivers. They go through drivers like outfits, trash their own rookies who don't immediately succeed or make mistakes in the media, even drop or demote them midseason, they destroy careers and self-esteem, and they act like Max, their top driver, is the second coming while the others are afterthoughts. There's also the fact that Max has used slurs before and is often pretty petulant and unsportsmanlike when facing adversity, and his (ever present) dad Jos is a not very successful ex-driver with domestic violence issues.

I loathed Merc and Lewis and their dominance for a long time. I cheered for Nico Rosberg during that rivalry and the pettiness of his and Lewis's fighting made me very anti-Lewis for a while. He was also kind of a shallow-seeming jet-setting celeb type with some ignorant opinions at times and I resented his winning everything and making F1 boring for *years*. The last year or two though, he really won me over. He's matured a lot, become very outspoken on social justice, started using his platform to really do some good, and has seemingly made a real effort to be a role model, on and off the track. He's had some moments in the past - the bitter rivalry with Nico, a time where he mocked his nephew (I think) for wearing a skirt, but he's clearly made an effort to educate himself and even in this fairly contentious title fight, has kept his cool and been graceful under pressure.

A few years ago I would have killed for *anyone* to challenge Lewis just to break the monotony and seeming pointlessness of one guy/team winning 90% of races. I would have said back then I'd have cheered for anyone who gave him a fight. But between Lewis growing on me and Red Bull being ever more slimy and loathsome, I ended up hoping Lewis won again after all.

Anyway, there's been some clashes and drama this season, most of which I've probably forgotten.

A few weeks ago in Brazil was a big one. Lewis got a grid penalty for a tiny irregularity with his rear wing and ended up starting the race from 10th with Max starting on pole. Lewis came back to win the race despite an incident where Max pushed him wide and off the track when he tried to overtake him. Max got no penalty for this, which made many people angry at race direction.

Last week in Saudi Arabia, on a new and somewhat narrow, tricky (arguably too narrow and unsafe) street circuit, more chaos. Max went in leading the championship by 8 points. A win would have made it very hard for Lewis to catch him.

I tried to summarize the chaos but it got ridiculously long. This recap should give you the general idea even if you don't follow everything. Suffice it to say, we came out of that race with:

a) Lewis and Max tied on points

b) A lot of people mad at Max, some mad at Lewis

c) Almost everyone VERY mad at race direction and the stewards (a panel of former drivers, etc, who make decisions on penalties and such)

Race direction/the stewards came off very poorly - the weird negotiation with Red Bull in the first red flag, where they were "offered an opportunity" rather than any formal investigation or penalty seemed super shady. Their communication later in the race about giving back a place was a shambles. And despite several other incidents involving Max, they only gave him a 10 second penalty, after the race when they knew 10 seconds wouldn't change the result so it seemed very much like they wanted to be seen doing something but not anything meaningful. People pointed out that years ago, Lewis had a win taken away from him for an incident very similar to what Max did and others have gotten more severe penalties for minor things like doing practice starts in the wrong part of the track than Max did for very dangerous driving.

So we came into this weekend tied on points and also with a sort of general feeling that we hoped to avoid drama because race direction getting involved again was not going to be a good look. And well...we were right.

The gist of this race is that late in the race, Lewis was leading (there were some early shenanigans again involving off track adventures where he gained maybe a second advantage and RB were mad but nothing was penalized - here is a full recap). He had older harder (slightly slower, but longer lasting) tires, Max had new soft tires and was hoping to chase him down but Lewis had a 15s lead with 10 laps left and while it's *possible* Max might have caught him, it was probably unlikely, looking less likely as we got down to 4 laps to go.

But we don't know because another driver crashed with 4 laps to go, causing a safety car (everyone has to slow down, no overtaking allowed). This allowed the gap to close up. This obviously was bad luck for Lewis, good luck for Max. But the timing was killer. A 15s lead over 10 laps was a big ask to make up. A much smaller gap with newer, faster tires, almost a sure thing.

The safety car lasted 3 laps. There were 5 lapped cars - ones at the back of the race that the leaders had passed again from behind - between Lewis and Max. Normally under a safety car lapped cars are allowed to unlap themselves, getting out from among the leaders and back to the end of the procession. Today, race direction first said lapped cars would *not* be allowed to unlap themselves, then reversed this (I think after some pressure from Red Bull?) - but *only* for the 5 cars between Max and Lewis, a very irregular decision and essentially clearing Max's path.

It was kind of a lose-lose situation in some ways. Ending the race under the safety car meant handing the win to Lewis. Ending the safety car and resuming the race with one lap to go gave the illusion of a final lap showdown, but in reality, basically handed the win to Max, a perception that was enhanced by how they'd helpfully cleared his path for him. Lewis had no chance to hold Max, on newer tires, off and Max easily passed him and won.

The safety car in the last laps was pretty much unavoidable and maybe there was no way it ended in a satisfying way. But race direction's extremely irregular handling of it caused all kinds of questions and controversy. Neither driver was at fault for what happened in the end but it sucked for both of them, though obviously more for the guy who had his title snatched away at the last second. But it meant the title was essentially decided by race direction decisions and a cloud of suspicion and controversy hands over this title thanks to that.

The increasing unhappiness with race direction and Masi all season has reached a boiling point. The popularity of the Drive to Survive series has some people wondering if decisions are being made for spectacle and drama rather than sporting fairness. With the exception of some Max fans, everyone is upset about how today ended up.

Seeing your driver lose in a battle on track can be heartbreaking but it's an outcome you know is a possibility and are prepared for. Seeing your driver lose through a series of bizarre interventions from race direction is *infuriating*. Even seeing your driver win in circumstances like these is surely less satisfying than seeing them win after the drive of their lives, proving their dominance on track.

Meanwhile, Red Bull and Christian have been their usual charming, tactful, gracious selves in victory, saying Max's last lap pass was "a wonderful way to win the championship" and how fortunate it was Latifi crashed and got them that nice safety car and singing the praises of race direction (who they formerly claimed are no good and biased against them) and how they got everything exactly right today.

So overall, a shambolic, controversial, and frustrating end to a season a lot of people considered the most exciting and promising in years.

#f1 #replies #i am aware this is not at all objective #sorry #i'm still mad about it #also i probably got lots of details wrong or forgot other important moments due to having a terrible memory #but i think it conveys the general idea

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mish-tique · 3 years

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I had a conversation with a friend and how I didn't commit something is outstanding to me, the first thing she said and I probably should walked away then, she said Lewis is winning this much because of the car and not having any competition -Jenson, Seb, Nico, and Alonso are gone apparently-, then she proceeds to shock me completely by saying Max is the best driver in history and then Michael, Seb, Alonso, Charles, Dan, Lando, and then Lewis :), look my favourite driver is Max, Charles, and Lewis so when I say that I don’t consider Max the best driver for fuck sake I’m not saying he is awful and doesn't deserve a WDC because he fucking does okay?? But for you to come and ignore every record Lewis broke, and he broke a lot that we never thought would be even, coming close to being broken, and he did it so don't come and say he hasn’t earned the respect he got now.

I can go into this very detailed opinion on this but long story short:

people are forgetting that there is a difference between the best driver (all time), the best driver right now (like, this season) and your favorite driver. People should start using a little more words.

Personally, Max is my favorite driver.

I also think he's one of the best, if not the best this season. Hell, man's pulling off amazing races and has led the WDC multiple times already (still is!).

Doesn't take away that Lewis is the one who's doing just as good this season, but has also done better before in the previous seasons. Now comes in the whole "unfair difference between cars" argument because admittedly red bull hasn't always been as good as it is right now, but that's something else completely.

I'm not going to say he's the best driver (ever) though. That would be ignoring all those who have done just as amazing things if not better things than that max has done right now.

Generally, calling someone the best is a big mess anyways ugh.

(Doesn't change that I would like to see Max be the best. Will take lots and lots of time though. His era hasn't ended yet. It barely even started.)

Tell me your unpopular opinions to cure me from my covid boredom

#f1 #formula 1 #max verstappen #missha things

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