#August 27 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

stripedstarsblueflags · 5 months ago

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goodbye to a world

reading between the lines of the various goodbyes and dismissals to logan sargeant

Pt. 3: Oscar (press conference)

full series

not a goodbye (in the traditional sense of the word) but a fucking statement. obviously. because piastri.

the loscar dynamic is absolutely FASCINATING. out of all the friendships in the grid, this one plays a special role: it reminds the audience that there’s so much more than formula 1, there’s so much more to f1 drivers than this stage of their career. most of us (spectators) have a broad conception of the “typical” driver backstory; rich kid with rich parents, got in a go kart at age 4, karting and then single-seater and junior series was their whole life and they climbed up the ranks like rungs on a ladder. i think a lot of people who only watch f1 (myself included) tend to focus so much more on the Pinnacle of MotorsportTM that everything else just seems like prep. even though most if not all of the drivers grew up either 1) racing each other 2) watching each other on tv, we don’t really think of these relationships beyond and BEFORE f1.

until loscar. because what draws them together? they’re not teammates. they’re not rivals. williams is so far behind that they’re not even competitors. in many way, logan is entirely “out of oscar’s league”.

and yet they have this endearing, sweet, playful friendship that’s exactly what it seems like: people who have known each other since they were kids, grown up together, watched each other become the person they are today. there’s a casual, domestic intimacy neither of them have with their teammates, even if those relationships are also going well, because there’s this history element.

which is recalled no more vividly than when oscar and logan are compared. as they are too often.

total polar opposites. f1 stories practically the inverse of each other. one was a promising young talent who f1 teams had been keeping an eye on for years that, once thrown in the car at that “wait! isn’t he just a kid??” age, immediately proved his worth as a future superstar. Future World Champion, to quote the official moniker. “look at him go! look at OSCAR PIASTRI!” he’s a prodigy, he’s a social enigma, he’s a raw force of pure and driven talent.

then you have the other promising young talent who one f1 team had been keeping a loose eye on for years. who’s never done any free practices or tests. who’s barely even dipped his toe into the waters of f2. who’s shown a lot of raw potential but more noticeably, glittering fancy sponsors. who gets chucked into a car as a last-minute, scrapping underprepared and thrown-together plan B after the previous f2 graduate fails to keep his seat. and, while oscar soared off into the stratosphere, logan flops IMMEDIATELY.

go fucking figure. it’s almost like people like max verstappen and lewis hamilton are exceptions to the rule, not the rule itself, and an underprepared rushed overwhelmed rookie is actually NOT in a position to achieve immediate stardom! in fact, maybe that’s the OPPOSITE of what they need! so, in loscar, we have the exception to the rule (oscar) and the rule (logan). but that’s not the solidified narrative; the story, how history will remember the two of them, is that logan was nothing but a pale and washed-out shadow. always. open and shut case.

what does oscar have to say about it, though?

this was said to gp blog (great website); the full quotes from him are:

I sent him a text yesterday. He seemed okay. Obviously a little bit of a shock. Obviously it wasn't an easy time for him in F1. It was much more difficult for him than maybe I expected it to be going into F1. I think for me, his potential was much greater than what was on show in F1, for whatever reason it might be.

I know firsthand, being his teammate in the junior categories, racing him in basically everything, I know how quick he is. I don't think the change was completely unexpected...

Best of luck to him. Just a shame that, for whatever reason, he wasn't able to show everything that he's got. Because in the junior categories, he was genuinely one of the quickest guys I went up against. I think his potential is much greater than what some people have seen.

first of all, some BEAUTIFUL toeing-the-line from oscar here. he’s even more subtle than alex in that none of his words imply any sort of passive aggression or ill intent; the only emotion that’s really conveyed, in understated tones, is a mild perplexity about logan’s career and failure in general as opposed to its gut-wrenching end in question. the implications in his wording imply nothing more than a personal opinion, but the ambiguity itself is some massive shade. let’s take a closer look:

much more difficult for him than maybe i expected it to be- this is masterful. “yeah, that’s right. i’m the next-gen prodigal superstar talent with my future as a world champion pretty much written for me, and i’ve shown the skill to back it up, and not only did i know logan before the catastrophe of f1 but i regarded him with so much respect that i had actual expectations. his skill had become such an intertwined part of his character in my eyes that i just assumed things would go so much better. because i believed in him.”

his potential was much greater than what was on show in f1…- toeing the line again. balance. acknowledging both the reality and all the roads not taken. “i’m not making false claims. i’m not making excuses for him. i’m not blaming the car or the team or the lack of support or the disgrace or the mistreatment and i’m not challenging the results. i’m not talking about what happened, i’m talking about what could’ve happened. potential. i’m talking about everything that wasn’t on show– and by not on show i mean that his potential, his skill, his pace, him as a person was not seen or understood or respected or prioritized by anyone. i’m not saying ‘oh, one point in 36 starts is all anyone could do with x/y/z excuse’ i’m saying ‘you guys missed the point’.”

for whatever reason that might be/just a shame that, for whatever reason- fucking hell, this is harsh. this is practically an attack. “i’m not gonna make excuses, but i’m gonna leave this open. i’m not gonna call this bad luck or the way it goes sometimes or a bad break, i’m saying that Whatever Reason This Happened is not what should have happened. not a matter of chance or objective misfortune; this situation could have and should have worked out better and whatever obstacle got in the way of that was a matter of misjudgment.”

I know firsthand, being his teammate in the junior categories, racing him in basically everything, I know how quick he is- alex said something similar, about pace. “raw speed” he calls it. and it’s really interesting that his teammates, who learn firsthand about him as a racer, his driving style, his strengths, his weaknesses (whether they’ve been teammates for months or years) identify a specific trait/skill about logan rather than just making the empty claim that “he’s good” or “he’s better than this”. and this is very interesting coming from oscar in particular given his current teammate. lando isn’t the best starter or the best defender or the most coordinated overtaker, but even with all the areas he needs to work on he can still compensate for it by being really fucking fast. his pace is his defense; he gets clean air and boom, he’s fucking gone. obviously that’s an oversimplification but oscar directly competing against that and observing/absorbing that and bringing up the same category of skill in logan– even in flashback– can’t be overlooked. in addition: “yeah, i’ve raced against him in basically everything. you’ve watched him on tv in a backmarker team for a season or so? i’ve known him for YEARS. i know. i don’t care what you’re seeing, i’m the expert on this and i know.”

I think his potential is much greater than what some people have seen- shit, this is as close to passive aggression as he gets, but it’s still done so precisely and subtly that it’s almost an art form. i mean, leave it to oscar piastri to use the phrase “some people” and NOT make it sound like a straight up, poorly-veiled callout. try to use that in a sentence without seeming like you’re shit-talking someone, potentially in the room. this is part of the lovely passive-aggression classic: “….unlike SOME people” (sometimes while staring at them directly, depending on how passive you want the passive aggression to really be. so, he’s (in unofficial terms) calling out who– anyone who hasn’t seen logan’s potential. who have underestimated him. who have invalidated his situation and him as an athlete. this could be any category of haters– negative fans, petty journalists, the horrid type of reports who will ask questions like “what does it feel like to be the slowest driver in formula 1…”. and that would make perfect sense. almost perfect. if we thought oscar piastri paid any attention to the haters, his own or anyone else’s. if it was ever on his mind. so, people who haven’t seen his potential… what, like, team principals? the ambiguity in itself is simultaneously a direct implication and oscar piastri’s intelligence needs to be studied because it is sometimes terrifying.

oscar doesn’t make a statement on social media, doesn’t bring it up further, doesn’t make any sort of personal goodbye available to the media– of course he wouldn’t, not just because that’s incredibly private but also because he’s oscar and he’s basically kimi raikkonen (in this analogy lando is sunshine boy seb but that’s an idea for another post). oscar’s whole public image is that he doesn’t want to have a public image. he doesn’t give the media any more parts of himself than he’s contractually obligated to. what he does give is concise, serious, the strongest points in the fewest words. and because of the enigmatic, tantalizing nature of that approach paired with the fact that he’s a fucking brilliant driver, people listen to what he has to say.

so oscar has a lot more weight to throw around than alex. alex’s image is that he’s a cuddly sunshiney cat dad who is a living anomaly in that he’s a good driver and a total sweetheart at once. whether or not what he says comes from the heart (it does. he’s alex) the reaction can always be “awww look at alex he’s such a nice guy :)” and the focus is on the kindness of the gesture/praise/respect itself rather than what alex is actually saying. so if alex says logan had more potential, that’s alex being alex.

if oscar says logan had more potential, that’s a fucking statement. and if the media wasn’t coming for JV’s head at this point, oscar just gave them a diagram for how to build a guillotine.

beautiful.

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stripedstarsblueflags · 6 months ago

Text

goodbye to a world

reading between the lines of the various goodbyes and dismissals to logan sargeant

Pt. 2: Alex on socials

full series

oh, alex albon. you beautiful soul.

it goes without saying that the social media presence of drivers is so important that it’s monitored and orchestrated by an entire group of people– but a team like williams? they’ve got that shit under lock and key. i’ve said this before and i’ll say it again: the shitstorm williams has been in puts an unbelievable amount of pressure on their drivers not just to perform well but to pick up the pieces. they’re at the forefront of the “let’s look forward! let’s keep pushing” optimism campaign that all backmarker teams have to put together for the sake of professionalism. logan basically doesn’t have a social media presence, and you see more of him on the official f1 grid photography dumps than williams’ own account. alex’s posts are more frequent, but the content itself might as well be autogenerated. in conferences, they’re both reserved, careful what they say, always swinging back inelegantly towards the same one-liner: “we’ll look at the data, reset, hope to come back stronger in [next race]”. and unlike teams like mclaren, mercedes, ferrari– the two teammates definitely don’t make posts to or about each other.

alex posts this three hours after the official august 27 announcement:

alex…

this is going to have to be a list again, isn’t it? one post, a few photos, and he’s already said and conveyed so much more than the williams “statements” ever even tried.

first of all, 12:20 exactly? that’s been queued. obviously. we also know that alex found out about logan being axed mere hours before the decision, and i for one think that was absolutely deliberate. they wanted to get logan out– like, physically out of their vicinity– as quickly and as discretely as possible. so are they going to give alex, who’s famously kind and compassionate and talks too much and pays more on-camera attention to logan than practically anyone else in that team… they’re going to give him a heads up? unlikely.

so is there a chance that this post was composed for him before they even told him? that’s actually almost a certainty, but the most important detail to mention is that caption. let’s go sentence-by-sentence.

“i know firsthand how brutal this sport can be…”

wow. okay. i said sentence-by-sentence but i can’t even get past this because… BRUTAL. what a word. this is clearly a reference to alex’s own replacement by red bull. 2019. not that long ago, but considering alex’s f1 presence has already been solidified as “adhd cat dad who can also outperform the SHIT out of a backmarker car” it’s not something that’s called back too often, that he had a shot in a front running team. it wasn’t really a fall from grace, was it? because even in a williams alex has continued to prove himself and put that car way further ahead than it deserves to be. so it was painful but not in a way that, like, max’s silverstone crash is still painful to some people. it’s pretty distant in the f1 public consciousness from what i can tell.

but alex is making a point to throw back to it. not in detail, not heavily, because he’s not making it about himself. the only allusion to the actual event is the word “firsthand”. high is the right way to go about it because saying anything about “back when i” would be going too far, reshifting the spotlight in the wrong direction. but he’s asking us all:

remember when i was a kid and i was trying to build myself up and they tossed me aside like i was nothing? remember when i got discarded by a team that’s burned through so many second drivers already, and left thinking my only f1 legacy would be “that disappointment”? remember how much that hurt?

brutal. what a word. because that’s what red bull is, that’s what they do. famously. but it’s definitely not the word you’d apply to a team that’s supposed to be The Underdogs and A Family and A Lovely Sense of Familiarity and Support what fucking ever.

so alex gets away with this by the way he’s planned out the last half of that phrase: “how brutal this sport can be…” because he says ‘this sport’, not ‘this team’ or ‘james vowles’. so he’s flipping a two-sided coin here:

side one, on the surface. what williams want to see from him and want to believe. the sport is brutal. it is what it is. life’s not fair. that’s just how it goes. no blame but the harsh reality of the sport itself.

side two, between the lines. not too far deep between the lines, too, all you have to do to see this side is not have a compulsive, ashamed, desperate desire to see anything else. this is brutal. what’s happening to logan is brutal. what’s happening is painful and humiliating and you’re leaving him in the dust like he was always disposable, like you never wanted him, like you can’t wait to forget about him and i know because that’s what happened to me.

he’s saying this right to their faces. he’s saying it to everyone.

“…it’s tough to see Logan leave the team mid-season.”

i have a feeling this is the part that was prewritten just because of the word tough. “this is, of course, incredibly tough on” et cetera, we know where that understatement came from. the emphasis is on the fact that the disruption, the replacement is happening literally during the season, which is Such A Mess For Everyone, not the fact that the disruption is logan losing his entire career in disgrace (because he’s already said that part). so this single sentence toes the line so gracefully it’s almost an art.

“You gave it your all brother and it’s been a pleasure being teammates with you.”

this is really interesting specifically for the fact that 1) shortly after james manages to say the same thing as a put-down and 2) he goes on to contradict himself. i’m going to pick up later on the “you gave it your all” part because we will definitely revisit that, but the second half is nice too. it’s not focusing on logan’s performance as a williams driver, or as an f1 driver. it’s about logan– and, to an extent, himself– in a light people don’t tend to see either of them in: as a teammate. when you’ve got a team like mclaren or ferrari where the teammates are so closely matched that their race craft, cooperation and competition is a direct talking point in their racing, we talk about that a lot more often. but alex and logan can spend a race more than half a grid apart from each other, and as a williams driver that’s been true for alex this whole time. so we don’t think of which of them is or isn’t a better teammate because they’re barely driving the same race, and they’re not being treated like they’re in the same team. but even bringing that up in a post is good to see, just another way to give logan an additional title. the williams’ failure, the underperformer, the disappointment, the backmarker, and– oh yeah, alex albon’s teammate. love to see it.

“I know whatever you do next, you’ll be awesome.”

WOAH. okay, talk about shifting the spotlight. what’s been the williams 2024 story so far? i mean, if you were going to use a sentence to describe “how we got here” and “where we’re going”? we would probably see something like: logan’s failure in 24 brought in carlos sainz for 25. the narrative from james vowles in particular is: whatever we do next with carlos sainz, we’ll be awesome. the williams narrative since jv took over has basically been “uhhh yeah we’re nowhere now but WE’RE GONNA BE!! UH! SOMEWHERE! EVENTUALLY!” all about the future.

logan, in contrast… his whole narrative since joining f1 and immediately tumbling has been “he had a chance for a future but it’s gone now.”

not. to. alex. albon. in the wake of this announcement everybody is fucking reeling, and in the context of williams people are buzzing all around colapinto and how he’s been rocketed into the limelight for the better or worse, and all the distraught logan fans are either throwing up or screaming to the heavens, “WHAT NOW??” logan is being pushed aside the same way you’d push some clutter off a desk. he’s evaporating into thin air, or at least that’s what williams are trying to make him do.

three hours in, and alex albon is there to remind us: logan’s story is not over. he’s acknowledging that logan’s future is wide open, empty, undecided and unprepared (“whatever you do next”) but he’s ACKNOWLEDGING THE FUTURE. and the change in tone from third-person “seeing Logan” to second-person “you’ll be awesome”… once again, it’s not about him. it’s not about alex being a nice guy and a nice teammate and showing the world how nice he is by taking pity on this other person who’s leaving. he’s personally telling logan and by extension us: you’ll be awesome. doesn’t matter where you go, what you do, you have the potential to be awesome and so you will be. it’s not even “have fun” “enjoy where you’re going” “i hope you do well” it’s <<you will>>.

“Just you fucking wait,” Alex is saying. “You wait and watch. He’ll show you.”

it’s not just a lovely goodbye, it’s a ferocious goodbye. it’s a statement. it’s a confident send off, maybe the only genuine vote of confidence he’s ever gotten from williams.

and we love to see it.

#f1 #formula 1 #williams f1 #my writing #fanalysis #goodbye to a world #sarebon #lolex #alex albon #aa23 #logan sargeant #ls2 #august 27 #goodbye #fucking devastating #send off #beautiful thing #223 #fuck james vowles

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