#also i got xkit again. thank fuck. he's so hard to tag

[i3utterflyeffect]

I wonder what happens if purple gets caught? Mango is gonna have a heart attack I think.

blackmail king with his child once, shame on you. blackmail him with his child twice and you're going to find out what happened to the people at the minecraft disaster of 201X

i used sir for simplicity's sake also because it's a fucking pain to find a proper equivalent

(reblogs > likes)

[formulatrash]

Hi Hazel, I was wondering what is your opinion about Nelson Piquet Jr.? Both as a person and as a racer. He seems like a really nice guy that gets thrown into trouble a lot, and as you knwo him, I was curious. Thanks, and have a lovely day!

Nels is a weird one - I can’t remember if I’ve answered an ask about him before but anyhoo, here it is again if I have (I was really bad at tagging asks at first, sorry) (edit: one second I forgot xkit posts if you hit return in the tags ffs) Nelsinho is very guarded and understandably so - he got completely publicly minced by not only his own team and manager and the people he was supposed to trust in the sport but the press and other drivers after crashgate. Which he was only 23 during and it ended his F1 career in absolute (unfair) disgrace.

Nelson’s dad (Piquet Snr) had made it clear it was only worth him racing if he was in F1, so when his seat was threatened unless he crashed Nelson did it. Then got dropped and disgraced and blamed for the whole thing anyway and it took a long time to clear his name, never really allowed back into European racing as a credible driver until Formula E. 

In the meantime, he did some shitty things - he got a major reprimand from NASCAR for calling another driver a f*ggot (it has to be said, this is unfortunately a word used casually in a lot of paddocks) and he generally behaved like a dickhead. I can say things like “because he didn’t have a way of processing his grief at losing his F1 career, disappointing his father and disgracing himself” and like - I am confident that’s true but it also doesn’t really excuse it except that racing is a fucked up, hypermasculine world and also that’s a bit too far into pretending I can read Nelson’s thoughts - even if he projects them pretty hard at times.

I know I said this in AWGG but Nelson had a lot to be redeemed by coming to Formula E. Almost all of them did, in the early days - from Di Grassi wanting to prove his pioneer credentials as more than an F1 backmarker or a factory team oddball in WEC, to Abt wanting to be more than his surname, JEV on the catastrophic downwards spiral of being cast aside and judged as coming short, Sam Bird just wanting to pay his electricity bill, etc. 

Piquet had to prove he wasn’t dirty. That he had value as a racer. His dad was never going to praise him for it (he refused to even come to the London races when Nelson took the title) and it wasn’t going to redeem him in the eyes of F1 but being a champion in this fiercely-fought, weird, gay little electric thing everyone else looked down on as emasculated and outcast was, y’know. Important.

Beyond that; Nelson can’t hide his moods, no amount of media training would disguise when he’s unhappy and he turns to that easily, struggling to be optimistic. He has a lot of what we would call on the tumblr “straight up regular trauma” and which probably gets brushed aside as shit he ought to somehow be able to suppress because sociedad is very healthy and functional.

He can be very sweet, he can also be closed off and mean - it depends how you get him. I was impressed with how open and soft and honest he was with Fisher in And We Go Green; he’s clearly comfortable in his own home but outside environments he can control, he gets nervous and antsy - like a cat, he’s friendly until you bother him somehow.

I am very fond of him. All my drivers are a bit dramatic and you tend to get them at their most extreme because of the compressed race day format but I think Nelson gets an unfair rep.