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🎵 ja, må hon leva! ja, må hon leva! ja, må hon leva uti hundrade år! javisst ska hon leva! javisst ska hon leva javisst ska hon leva uti hundrade år! 🎵

!!!!!!!! happy birthday k. imagine me singing that in my terrible singing voice. also, i did consider sending you the entire song 'cause it's all about being shot and hanged and drowned lol. don't know how swedes as a people decided that's how we should celebrate people's birthdays.

ANYWAY. happy birthday, i'm so happy to have you in my life 'cause you're legit one of the bright spots in it. i hope the next year is filled with lots of cat shenanigans, travel, oscar being wdc, delicious food, etc 'cause you deserve all of it ❤️ sending lots of love and hugs your way and hoping you get presents and cake and all the good things today (including a oscar win! that boy better show up for you today!)

🎉🎂🎀🎁🎈❤️

TACK 💗💗💗 i am so excited for YOU to adopt your kitties and see how big those little monsters grow. hehe grateful for your presence in my life let's all eat delicious food with mama

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highlights of age 26 include adopting my cats, visiting australia for the first time to attend ausgp, seeing so many beloved oomfs, and my guy leading the championship 🧡 have spent this whole week eating good food and enjoying good company i am truly blessed!! hehe here's to more good times

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OSCAR PIASTRI Monza Grand Prix 2025

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you have to admit it's really funny that mclaren are so determined to create the most boring milquetoast narratives of all time like they told lando they wouldn't let him be undercut and then followed through and everyone is like but i wanted strife and drama in my strife and drama sport ): which obviously creates problems in the aftermath but even so oscar will never be as openly bitter and explosive as people want. i love my boring milquetoast team #myteam #mydriver

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🏎️ 🦅 🌏 ❓

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do yall ever wonder what you’re best known for in the fandom ?

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since we’re more than halfway into the season now, do you have an updated list of favorite oscar wins?

OMG 🧡 great question... my old list was only missing 2 actually but now that you're letting me think about this they might be my favorite so far. also this list is funny because all things considered i love hungary as a win still and value it so much, it's just that All His Other Wins are either way better or less ~emotionally complicated~ so they edge it out a little LOL. BUT IT'S STILL A GOOD WIN!!!

belgium 2025

netherlands 2025

azerbaijan 2024

spain 2025

miami 2025

bahrain & china 2025

saudi arabia 2025

hungary 2024

anyway spa was kind of a mess to get rolling (no pun intended), but i just love it for how much HE loves the track tbh and how he managed to get the jump on lando and control the pace for the rest of the race. obviously spa isn't that great for overtaking during the race without a huge delta and the end was kind of a tease with the faux-ish tyre disadvantage and lando's lockups, but it was still a really good display of oscar's consistency paired with the emotional significance of his fav track, and honestly i just love when he wins races outside of pole to ease my doomerist heart!

and of course netherlands is netherlands... first grand slam and a perfect race from start to finish! it's a shame that the ending somewhat overshadowed his performance and how he managed to "get" the track just at the right time to snag pole (obviously He would like to not take that long to build up to optimal condition but at least he got it done). also significant for me mathematically in terms of the championship lead, so maybe i'm giving it too much weight atm because we're still in the thick of it and i'll change my mind later but for now it goes there...

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i need that last paragraph of your other answer to be like on a broadcast bc why is there this widespread narrative that papaya rules refers to team orders and/or swapping drivers (which inevitably leads to the discussion of mcl sabotaging one of their own drivers which is another laughable topic) when it's pretty obviously always meant (incl the original context where we learned the phrase) "don't crash into each other"

commentators and random reddit guys: Man I wish we could find out what papaya rules mean

us: it means don't crash

andrea: it means don't crash

oscar: it means don't crash

lando: it means don't crash

commentators and random reddit guys: But I guess we'll never know...

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as fun as it can be to try work out relative performance and potential ceilings etc at home, at a certain point there has to be an acknowledgement that the teams have access to way more info about the drivers to help them make informed judgements about how good they are and can be. doesn't mean the information is always enough, especially with rookies, and sometimes there are other considerations at play when signing drivers beyond best talent available, but every decision mclaren has made over the past few years suggests they're pretty happy with oscar and lando as drivers & believe they're both good enough to win a championship. hypothetical scenarios of things that aren't happening kinda do mean less than that at the end of the day!

yes exactly anon!! i honestly should have led with that but thank you for putting it much more succinctly LOL. i wouldn't even know where to begin with the narrative that mclaren are unsatisfied with their talent, it's extremely difficult for a team to be more invested in a single junior driver than mclaren has been with lando + obviously poaching oscar was a huge, calculated risk they jumped on the moment the opportunity presented itself because they clearly held him in very high regard.

most data is hypothetical to a degree because even controlled testing environments and sim work don't give the full picture of your racing capabilities, but teams are still privy to much more data than we'll ever be as fans (which includes pundits/journalists). in the end i just find it funny that people are like oh Driver X deserves this mclaren car because it completely disregards the journey mclaren has gone on as an entire organization to reach this milestone and the fact that many things had to go right in tandem for our b2b wcc titles to become achievable. andrea righting andreas's wrongs, zbrown taking on tp media duties but otherwise remaining in his lane as an untechnical ceo, lando being an anchor point for the team for so many years and keeping them relatively competitive in the midfield, oscar pushing lando through his own growth journey and also both of them being respectful and clean enough that they've been able to give mclaren the consistency it needs to deliver not just the car but also the performances worthy of it. none of this could have happened without everyone involved!

and at the end of the day Papaya Rules isn't even a hahafunnyinsult it's just a reflection of the belief in 814 to be Normal when they race each other LOL. like there's this misconception that papayarules somehow refers to strategy decisions or case-by-case prioritization but we're at the point where the championship is ours and mclaren doesn't functionally care who wins anymore so it literally just means you can race because we're not going to force anyone to be #2 but just don't do any embarrassing shit while ur at it. So in fact it's literally a declaration that they don't think anyone is the #2 on the team. ahem!

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how life feels when you're just a normal guy supporting another normal guy and also his name is oscar piastri

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This is probably going to sound dumb as hell, but anyway(lol), do you know if you can tell for sure when a driver is "overdriving" a car or when they're wasting it? or is it just perception? I understand that in cases where there's a big gap between teammates, logically you know one is underperforming, but what about the one in front? How do you know if they're extracting the car's full potential? E.g, we all assume the rb is terrible this year because Max struggles to win, but how do you know if in one of those races Max wasn't on his best form and the car was competitive? Considering there's no one to compare with because the other drivers in rb naturally don't adapt. I wonder the same thing in the opposite case with mclaren, how do fans know it's a dominant car that should get every pole and win every race? We know the car is competitive because of the results of the drivers themselves, both are close in performance and have won most of the races, so I don't understand when neither can get pole or win the race people immediately think they're underperforming instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt that the car doesn't have that big of a margin on every track 🤨 and these conclusions aren't just drawn by fans, but also by journalists or people within the sport itself. Is there any basis for this, or is f1 the most subjective sport in the world? Sorry for the long ass question 😭

hey anon!! sorry for super late reply, i've been busy with life but am currently sitting in the hotel for labor day trip so let me finally get to this question...

i somewhat discussed this "phenomenon" in this answer wrt: YOU CAN'T DECIDE SOMEONE'S CEILING FROM THINGS THAT HAVE NEVER HAPPENED!!! so my own personal take is that frankly no one knows and no one can ever know, but the whole point of sport and motorsport specifically is that these things are meant to be a gamble... it's literal stonks and value projection. so people are entitled to their vibe-based evaluations because frankly they find it fun.

to dive into this further there are two main components to driver adaptation, i.e. whether they are capable of doing it in the first place but also subsequently how LONG it takes them to reach the same competitive heights as their teammate in the same car. obviously there is an allowance for pace deficits at the beginning of a career/team stint, but even if you aren't some guy getting your ass whacked in a red bull you still can't be mick schumacher needing the entire season to stop being a crash risk in your vehicle's current configuration. but this is why teams take risks, why they'll (read: red bull) invest in questionably-proven drivers with one good performance in their cv to throw to the sharks and then push right back out the door once their productivity has run dry. that's all sports, to some degree or another, but the severity of this methodology is determined by 1) the figurehead in control of the machine and 2) the inadvertent narratives spun by the extreme ends of a driver's career.

my other hot take, not really completely but somewhat relevant to this aside, is that even in an inherently skewed environment drivers WILL regress toward the mean. a not-great driver, given the proper comparables by which to draw this conclusion, will prove to be a not-great driver sooner than later, usually through a combination of direct quali/race pace difference to their teammate, crash-proneness, growth trajectory over the span of their career, and other obvious surface-level assessments. the problem then is of course that f1 is such a narratively-laden sport that it's hard for fans and even journalists to see things for their averages, to envision a mean that each high or low could contribute to, to remember that we are not just our outliers but the sum of every kind-of-boring or consistent or OK performance as well, which is why for example many people spent years earnestly propping up dr3's one win during his embarrassing, futile, and career-ruining stint to lando's "nowins" performance as the top midfield driver. people are great at forgetting the good and maybe even kind of great. That's Life and that's sport.

anyway sorry i'm getting kind of carried away but when you think of this and look at red bull, it's understandable that max looks like a fucking god next to the teammates he's had against him, and the evidence is especially damning when you consider the successful drives several of his competitors have enjoyed at vcarb. and if you asked for my personal opinion, i do honestly think max is probably the best driver on the grid at the moment, but also i'm like TBH everyone else he's competing against is probably just OK. does the red bull's "true" performance as a car lie somewhere between these assessments? you can also say that sure, the car is just tricky as hell and no one is able to adapt to it like max has, BUT DRIVING A TRICKY CAR IS BEING A GOOD DRIVER! and i don't think liam or yuki are frankly amazing drivers, because as much as i love yuki he spent years stagnating at vcarb and was promoted to red bull under the pretense of schrödinger's potential, and that's just kind of life. Either you make it or you don't.

the thing with lando and oscar is that when you look at them relative to a lot of other up-and-coming drivers, they both have extremely impressive junior careers. and yes you can argue against the junior ladder, you can point to team advantages, to ""bad luck"" for their competitors (again... it's The Mean. never bring ls2 junior career prop into my inbox) etc., but they came into f1 well and fully hyped! and because of that we've now hit a quandary where lando, who spent years proving to be better than carlos and daniel in lesser machinery, is now competing similarly to his younger, less-proven teammate, and people are unsure how to evaluate their skill level relative to the competitiveness of the car. Because they crave these extreme narratives. Because they want to say that max beating on checo means he was "deserving" (worst word ever) of his titles but lando and oscar being relatively evenly matched means the car is the only vehicle to their success and that red bull has completely fallen off the development game.

EVEN THOUGH THE THING IS!!! the thing is. ok this is just my own hot take, but i truly believe that people are so used to Drivers Being Relatively Bad that their minds can't process that maybe lando and oscar are both just good drivers. and of course as an oscar fan i am obviously biased in this assessment but i see his strengths as his quiet adaptability, his ability to finetune weakness after weakness in methodological fashion (tyre management, quali pace, sc restarts, etc.), and to seek growth as linearly as possible. and i think for commentators this narrative just reads as... Unimpressive, i guess, because oscar is the guy who will drive as slowly as needed to maintain a lead and mitigate risks, and that's BORING! it just is.

here's a hypothetical i can offer: maybe the tricky red bull driven suboptimally by a non-max driver is a "lesser" car than the easier vcarb driven optimally by that same driver is. but in this scenario, likely its optimal ceiling is lower than the tricky red bull's optimal ceiling on average, because maybe the red bull in perfect condition is capable of a race win on merit while the vcarb is respectively only capable of a podium. maybe! we don't know for sure. this doesn't even take into account that "optimal" is relative to other team's developmental successes, so maybe a track where the red bull is self-referentially strong is a track where the mclaren is equally strong, but perhaps there are other weather and track conditions and other combinations of factors where this situation appears dramatically different. the average, of course, proves that mclaren has the strongest car of the season by a decent margin, a gap that was especially on display during the dutch gp today, but the minute nuances of driver/track/weather etc. influences aren't necessarily easy to grasp.

i do think oscar and lando have made a plethora of unforced errors this season. i think it's fair to not think they're the strongest drivers on the entire grid. but you can't for Realsies say that max, charles, george, lewis, whoever would be able to beat oscar or lando in the mclaren this season, because it has never happened! we don't know! we'll never know! that's life.

and honestly i think people just don't understand that Oscar Is Young and people grow and get better. so they're like how is lando being earnestly raced by some guy who lost every h2h to him by a large margin during his rookie year... this must mean they're both BAD, because every rookie needs to prove that he's better than his teammate or else he has no potential ! and it's like how do you not get that rookie b > established c (lando carlos) and rookie a < established b (oscar lando) does not mean that established a < established b. that's not how it werkssss. THAT'S NOT QUICK MAFS

but it is what it is. tl;dr I don't think f1 is necessarily the most subjective sport in the world but the models just forcibly cannot be the same because of how it is designed!!!

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2025 dutch gp 🥇 🎇

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three hundo points first race back from summer break... so blessed and grateful

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my birthday is on monza race day and my gp traveling buddy is visiting which means i'm going to ring in 27 by eating breakfast a sports bar at ass o'clock in the morning... as one does

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oscar's racing inspiration? 🤔

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: )

extra:

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McLaren F1 Team Drivers Design Custom Trading Cards with Agentforce

[reacting to Oscar's grid kid photo] Aw, that is cute. Throwback!