#fernando has said this year (and even last year) that the team doesn’t care about the sprints

[wintergreenoreo]

I would care about the P19 and P16 if it actually mattered which it doesn’t… cause it’s just the sprint quali. We will see how the boys really look in the quali that actually matters. That’s where they lock in.

[fernandopiastri28]

quand c’est - part 5 ~ ln4 x op81

part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8

Damage? Fuck. Shit. Fucking shit. “Will I be able to drive again?” Lando’s voice raises and wobbles, tears he can’t even feel dribbling down his cheeks. He doesn’t want to imagine a life without racing. He’s only just gotten his first win a few months back, he can’t lose it all now.

warnings: major illness, cancer, sickness, brain damage

Lando’s body feels fuzzy- if that’s possible.

Where is he?

He should be in the car, he knows he hasn’t finished the race yet. He still has a chance- he’s doing so well, he’s guaranteed at least 6 points.

So why can’t he move an inch? Why can’t he feel the familiar rumble of the car underneath him? Why can he just see chipping white paint above him for as far as he can see?

“He just- he doesn’t know when to say when, and-and it scares me,” There’s a stammering and choked voice cutting through the painful silence of the room. It’s one he knows just as well as he knows his own.

But right now, everything feels unfamiliar. His hearing feels like an old recorded tape, his teeth feel like they’ve been awkwardly shoved into his mouth, and his body- just isn’t his.

Bile shoots up his throat, and he feels immobilised. He can’t turn his head to cough or vomit it out- it’s like he’s frozen in place. He’s in a hospital, he can figure out that much. There’s an IV in his hand and a drip attached, slow trickles of water making their way into his system.

“Like- he fucking knows he’s unwell- he’s on the brink of death, but he’s too proud to ever accept it,” Who ever it is is clearly on the phone, passionately ranting about someone who Lando can only assume is himself.

Lando should’ve expected that. He let down a whole lot of people in Singapore. Himself- first off, the whole McLaren team- especially Zac and Andrea, all the McLaren fans who’d paid good money to see him race tonight and he’d just bombed it.

Most of all- he knows he has disappointed Oscar.

Maybe that’s who’s talking. “And I- I worry about him, all the fucking time. He never lets himself fully recover from anything. Las Vegas last year- he insisted on going out clubbing like two days later. In Amsterdam when he got that fucking cut on his nose and didn’t let anyone clean him up so now he’s got a permanent scar on his nose.”

Oscar’s still in the car. It must be Jon.

“He just- he won’t let anyone take care of him- even me. I just, I just wish he knew how willing I would be. I would drop anything to make sure he’s alright. Like-” Whoever it is is struggling to speak clearly, their voice stuffy and thick with tears. Lando feels awful, not just his body, but because he knows that this is his own doing.

The voice goes silent for a while, the noise of someone on the other end of the line quietly speaking sounds nothing more than a mumble to Lando. It almost feels like his ears have been stuffed with cotton.

“I’m just worried about him, Logan,” Logan? Why on earth would Logan be out of the car and on the phone. Better yet, why is Jon calling Logan Sargeant?

“Oscar?” Lando’s voice seems foreign, not attached to himself.

“Holy sh- Logan, he’s awake, I’ve gotta go,” Oscar hangs up the phone, rushing to Lando’s side to cling onto the edge of his hospital bed. “Lans,” He whispers, wiping his hand over the brit’s forehead. “How are you feeling?”

Lando spaces out, Oscar’s face becoming a blurry sight. “Why am I not in the car?”

Oscar looks away, chewing at his bottom lip. He’s being avoidant, trying to think of a way to let Lando down slowly- whatever the reason is.

“You crashed into Fernando.”

“Alonso?”

“No, Gasly.” He replies stone faced, “Of course Alonso,” Oscar’s face softens, a small smile appearing.

Lando grins for a moment, rolling his eyes. It falters when it sinks in what Oscar just said. You crashed into Fernando, not Fernando crashed into you. It was Lando’s fault.

“Why’d I crash? Was it wet out?” Memories of Sochi fill his head, fucking rain ruining his races. “Was there something wrong with the car?” He wants to be logical, and he’s trying to do that the best he can, but it all feels unexplainable. He can’t have crashed, there’s just no way.

“They think that-” Oscar shuts his eyes for a moment, and Lando can properly see his features again. Pale cheeks dusted an angry red, stained with tear drops. Brown eyes, watery and sore. A mess of hair on top of his head, much like how it normally sits after a race. “They think you had a seizure,”

What. The. Fuck.

“A what?” Lando knew what Oscar had said, but it was easier to play dumb, to pretend he didn’t have a clue as to what the younger boy was talking about. It was easier to play pretend.

Lando had never had a seizure before, nor did he have a history of seizures in his family. It just wasn’t possible.

“A seizure,” Fucking thanks Oscar, I did hear you the first time. “They’ve done a few tests on your head so..” Oscar’s tongue prods at the inside of his cheek, like he’s trying to avoid saying something. “They’re just seeing if there was any damage.

Damage? Fuck. Shit. Fucking shit. “Will I be able to drive again?” Lando’s voice raises and wobbles, tears he can’t even feel dribbling down his cheeks. He doesn’t want to imagine a life without racing. He’s only just gotten his first win a few months back, he can’t lose it all now.

Oscar sucks on his bottom lip, his teeth poking out on top of it slightly, “Don’t worry Lando,” He reaches over, hugging Lando to his chest tightly, “The doctors are taking good care of you, I’ll take care of you, I promise you will race again,”

Lando has never known Oscar to lie. If Oscar is promising that Lando will race again, Lando will race again.

A bubble forms in Lando’s throat, choking him, “I’m so sorry, Osc,” Oscar’s eyes immediately go wide with panic, unsure as to why Lando’s apologising. “I sh-should’ve listened to you, I’m such a fucking idiot,”

It’s because it’s clicking now- Oscar was complaining to Logan about how he never listens to him. He’s right, Lando is an awful boyfriend who doesn’t know how to fucking take care of himself. They’re supposed to be a couple, yet it’s more like Oscar’s his caretaker, and Lando hates himself for being Oscar in that position.

“Oh, Lans,” His voice is breathy as he drags his fingers along Lando’s cheek, soft and faint. “It’s okay, you’ll be okay, I’m not mad,” He kisses Lando’s forehead, his eyes studying each twitch Lando’s face makes.

Oscar’s not mad, but he’s definitely disappointed.

You stupid fuck, Lando Norris.

“Okay,” His voice halters, a forced response. They both go silent after that, Oscar holding Lando’s right hand in his own, kissing the back of the Brit's hand every so often.

Lando stares up at the ceiling. It’s better than looking at Oscar who just looks so broken and concerned. Lando will only hate himself more and more if he looks at Oscar, looks at who he let down.

“Mr Piastri, Mr Norris,” A doctor announces her presence in the room with a barely there knock on the door. It’s been a few hours of Lando laying and staring at the ceiling, he can only assume based on how it’s beginning to become bright outside. Lando tilts his head up, only then noticing that the pain in his head is almost fully gone.

Being doped up is a good feeling.

“Yes?” Oscar looks towards her, keeping Lando’s hand in his. He licks his lips, holding his breath in anticipation. He knows he needs to stay calm, he needs to stay strong for Lando no matter what the doctor says.

The doctor sucks in a deep breath. She looks no older than 25, which realistically she must be, but she looks only just older than the two boys. She looks like an experienced kid- just as Lando is, just like what he pretends he isn’t. "Mr. Norris, I have some upsetting news,”

Oscar looks at Lando, and Lando doesn;t meet his eyes. He knows that ‘upsetting’ doesn’t even begin to describe whatever he’s about to hear. He’s heard horror stories from acquaintances, he’s watched movies and shows. He knows they’re sugar coating whatever it is.

“So, we were correct- you suffered a tonic-clonic seizure during the race, just as you made contact with..” She trails off, unsure of the name of the driver Lando crashed into. He feels mortified, fucking crashing into the two time world champion of Fernando Alonso. Having a seizure and crashing into Alonso.

“And with the results of your recent MRI- they have detected a mass in the frontal lobe of your brain,” Lando’s eyebrows tighten and Oscar squeezes his hand, grounds him.” And it appears to be malignant,”

Lando doesn’t consider himself a particularly smart guy, and usually, it’s to his disadvantage. Yet, for once, his lack of knowledge for what malignant is means that he gets to stay in that sheltered bubble of nothing is wrong for just a bit longer.

He can pretend nothing is wrong, just for a few moments.

“We have several treatment options, including surgery and chemotherapy, which we can discuss in further detail if you have any questions about them.” Lando feels a tug in his hand, Oscar lurching forward in a sob. It’s bad, malignant must mean it’s bad.

He’s not going to let himself feel it. “Chemo?” Oscar’s voice cracks.

“We fear it has already developed to stage 1 brain cancer,”

Norris's lead is up to 4.5s now with 11 laps to go. Could his 110th grand prix be the occasion of his first victory?

“We are here to support you through every step of this process.”

Norris has finished second eight times and has 15 podiums to his name without winning. Could this finally be the day his luck turns? They're counting down the laps nervously at McLaren.

The door clicks shut and Oscar buries his face into Lando’s chest, “Oh my god Lando, Lans, I’m so sorry,”

Norris's lead ticks past the six seconds mark. Four laps to go and McLaren are practising their best poker faces on the pit wall. Not an inkling of a smile just yet on the face of Zak Brown.

“I love you Lando, I love you and I’m gonna- we’re gonna do this together, you’re gonna get better,”

Three laps to go for Norris. He's under no pressure from behind.

“You’re gonna race again, I promise you,”

Two to go now before F1 has a new race winner.

“You’re gonna win again, we're gonna be on the podium again together,”

Norris is onto his final lap. He can almost push it home from here.

“You’re gonna be a champion, Lans, a world champion,”

Across the line comes Lando Norris to win the 2024 F1 Miami Grand Prix! It's the first grand prix win of his career, and the first for McLaren since Monza 2021, when Daniel Ricciardo hit the top step.

Oscar’s a fucking liar and an idealist. Lando’s not gonna race again, if the brain cancer doesn’t kill him, it’s gonna leave him a shell of the man he once was.

He’s already not the Lando Norris, he’s hardly even Lando.

He’s just sick.

[formulatrash]

Could I get your opinion on Hamilton? Bc I feel like people either love him and are like he is the nicest person in the universe or hate him and think he’s the worst & tbh while he does seem genuinely good he’s also clearly willing to do quite a lot to win (2007) & I really doubt the Nico thing was one sided either way so... opinions.

Hello, anon - I got two of these so gonna answer this one rather than both .Lewis, man. Where the hell do you start with Lewis? Unquestionably one of the most talented drivers we have seen or will ever see on track. Not just for raw speed or ingenuity but with the way he has been able to adapt and learn across a changing era of cars - something a lot of the other drivers aspiring to GOAT status (Alonso, in particular) just haven’t been able to do. 

People think of Lewis as having unquestionably the best car. But that’s a recent development (and not always true even then) - the last few years he and Jenson were at McLaren, they were wildly outperforming the cars with a really strong driver pairing. (and the order was a little less rigid then, in all fairness)

I’m nearly the same age as Lewis so I remember him when he was a novelty - when what people said was that there was this guy in the junior categories who was fast - and this was always prefixed - he was black. 

People said he was stroppy, had cheating engines (there is no evidence of this, especially when you consider the budget he was working with) and that he had a bad attitude, he was never going to get to Formula One so why put him in your team, a kid like that couldn’t be a champion… in other words the extremely racialised term “uppity.” Like, have absolutely zero illusions on this front, people were not supportive.

Some were, obviously and for every hand up like the McLaren backing, the detractors got louder. So when Lewis took the GP2 title and moved up to F1, he had to come in hot and obnoxious. Especially with Fernando as his teammate. Especially with spygate about to wipe out any shine left on the mangled heap they’d made of the championship trophy that year.

And oh, the disqualification (for anyone not up to speed: the whole McLaren entry was excluded that season for allegedly spying on Ferrari) just validated the detractors: you see, he isn’t that good. He was cheating. 

Lewis has a temper. I don’t mean that in the sense he’s an angry guy, at all, just that there is a certain length you can push him and he will eventually snap, like all of us - he’s not a robot. And if you have to prove yourself again and again and again, in tests way beyond what anyone else is being scrutinised on, knowing that it is unfair and having no way to get past them but to once again, obnoxiously, excel then you will occasionally also make the odd sniping comment. 

I’ve never heard him say anything stroppier than he once threw a bit of a shit fit because he thought Jenson unfollowed him on Twitter, though - whereas the howling conniptions when he succeeds in whatever the latest arbitrary challenge someone has decided he must pass to be considered successful? Those continue to the day.

Lewis, of course, is now pretty zen. He’s spent a long time working on himself and has been repairing his relationship with his father (who used to be his manager until they somewhat explosively parted ways) and with old rivals. He’s been growing as a person and a driver, he’s been caring less about what people think. The Lewis now is very different to the Lewis even a few years ago - clearly a lot of self-reflection and space has happened, after what was years of charging around and also some - bluntly - horrible psychological shit which the Merc team definitely have to take some responsibility for because it was their success formula to set him and Nico against each other to push each other forwards.

And for all the bitterness between him and Nico, they were never, like, really loathing each other. Just couldn’t work together. I find it really ghoulish how eager the press is to see Carlos and Lando go the same way, asking when will you fall out? all the time like it wasn’t obvious both Lewis and Nico were in pretty horrible states during it. (I saw some of the aftermath via one of them and like, that’s some trauma right there :/)

Has Lewis had his controversies? For sure. Some of them I have been upset by - like when he posted an instagram story telling his nephew he couldn’t wear a dress. Thing about Lewis is that, especially as he’s got older, he doesn’t double-down on things like that, he goes away and reflects - and designed a range of skirts and modelled them for an interview where he was called on it, then went to Disneyland and walked round with his nephew wearing that princess dress he’d mocked him for. [warning: Daily Mail link sorry, only site that had the pics] 

Yes, ideally he would not have been a prang in the first place but it is also very good to publicly show growth. Especially in F1. 

I loved old, obnoxious fuckboy Lewis. He was the middle finger F1 needed showing - and his resilience to the number of times the press and the talking heads and the social circles of F1 tried to push him back down, only to spring back up with a blindingly-polished trophy… ah, you love to see it. 

Lewis means more to me than almost any other driver - and like, I vibe heavily with several - because he is that outlier example who shouldn’t have been counted but who keeps forcing them to score him into the ledgers of history, even now.

Is it good having a vocal advocate for women and for LGBT rights, who isn’t scared to call out motorsports prejudices and racism, so prominently in the sport? Yes. It’s a hard truth that he had to get this level of success in order to gain a platform because no when Lewis speaks people have to listen and report it. Because if his Instagram story can turn into a scandal, it can also be a communications platform. It’s why he holds a lot of sway with Liberty Media. 

Now Lewis’ rights to be in the sport are unassailable. So he can start on other fights he couldn’t take at the time - there’s a reason the F1 press still gives Wehrlein (who is one of the sweetest drivers I have ever worked with) the “uppity” treatment and it’s fucking sad. It’s so embarrassing to work in this industry that’s a thousand miles behind even other embarrassing industries on this global fucking shame. 

Look, I don’t give a fuck about the whole GOAT thing because sport is a continuous cycle (err, most years) and so ‘all time’ is a dumb thing to put in an accolade. But Lewis is, in my opinion, the best Formula One driver we have ever witnessed the career of. He is devastatingly good, has honed himself to a level where mistakes are such a rarity they’re a headline in and of themselves.

To maintain that, year after year after year? It’s not human. It’s a man who’s pushed himself beyond the pinnacle of the sport because he has proven everything and still someone will be typing out some snide little piece, at the same time I am writing this, that Hamilton will never be the greatest because [arbitrary mathematics about how you can’t count three of his titles so we don’t have to respect him yet. Not yet. It’s not that we don’t respect him because of who he is. It’s just one last test….]

Does Lewis being so good at Formula One driving it’s not really comprehensible below the level of fellow world champion make other drivers bad? No. He’s not walking to the titles. And maybe one day someone will be better than Lewis. Maybe he won’t be on form this year, somehow, for the first time in years of racing - if it ever starts again. Maybe he’ll retire to make tracksuits and rescue dolphins. 

I am glad he seems happy now. He looks incredible. Man gets hotter and nicer with every year and you absolutely love to see it. His growth in himself and the sport has been equally impressive and his transformative power, both in terms of pushing forward the sporting side and in terms of using his platforms for good, is awesome. 

(Lewis doesn’t have to speak out about stuff; I know people think it’s naff or crass or obnoxious or preachy but he could just not - and he knows people’d bash him for something else) 

That said, I wish he’d put some money into sponsoring some grass roots motorsport but that is literally my only beef with him. But yeah, we stan a complicated, evolutionary boy.

[skybound2]

David x Michael, on a road trip, arguing over music choices (or whatever permutation of that you would like to use!).

Hey, so 500 years later, I know, but I’ve written a thing! Well, several things, sorta? This is basically a series of short ficlets each focusing on a different song, but all connected, and is basically a direct follow on to the response I wrote MONTHS ago for a different prompt (You Are My Sunshine)! 

THANK YOU SO MUCH for the prompt, it helped get me out of a rut, LIKE A LOT. (Also, I had a TON OF FUN thinking up songs to set each piece too :-D)

Takes place in my Walk Unafraid universe sometime after Michael has gone full vamp, and is maybe just a little bit cracky ;-P

Hope you enjoy!

Billy Idol “Rebel Yell”

Michael frowns as the first few beating notes of the song start pouring out of the speakers. Before the first line is over, he’s a freshman again, shuffling into the streamer and tinsel decorated nightmare that was his first (and last) high school homecoming dance.

He hadn’t wanted to go. Would rather have been playing chicken with his skateboard on the highway. Or at home, babysitting Sam and rewatching that movie with the talking rats for the fiftieth time.

Or working on his math homework.

Really, just about anywhere else doing anything else would have been preferable.

But he’d made junior varsity on the football team (Thanks, he’s sure, to him being a year older than the rest of the freshman class. Flunking third grade. So helpful.) and even though he hadn’t played a second of that day’s game, it had been made clear that he was expected to attend that evening’s festivities. 

To support his team. And school.

Rah rah rah.

He hadn’t given a rat’s ass about any of it, not when the girl he’d been seeing (if you could call one awkward make-out session ‘seeing’) had broken things off with Michael the day before, opting to go to the dance with Michael’s friend Keith instead. 

The situation might have been less of a mess, Michael suspects, if the sight of his friend and former almost-girlfriend dancing together had sparked the expected kind of jealousy for Michael.

Which of course, it hadn’t. Instead, it had dosed Michael with a confusing case of adolescent ‘what the fucks’ when he’d caught Keith and Jenny kissing mid-dance, and he’d realized just who he was jealous over. 

The whole thing had gone topsy-turvy not long after, in a spectacular (sloppy, messy, pathetic) fist fight between Michael and Keith on the dance floor to the tune of that damn overplayed Billy Idol song.

Michael had been suspended for two days following the fight. Which had been fine by him, as it gave him time to first come to terms with what he’d been feeling, and then to find a careful place in his psyche to shove said feelings into, to be dealt with never.

Three years later, Michael had moved away, the bond between him and Keith forever broken.

As the memories play back in Michael’s head, Michael finds that the old agitation, that bitter ache of confusion and loss he’d always felt in the past, is muted. The scene’s a faded sort of matte gray, instead of technicolor. Like it happened to someone else, and he’s just catching the repeat on late night TV. 

Which in a way, he guesses it kind of had. The person he is now so far removed from who he was then as to be unrecognizable.

Different person or not, he still hates the song. (Maybe he hasn’t changed that much.) And so Michael’s lip lifts up in a sneering approximation of the blond singer’s trademark curl as he reaches for the knob and seeks out another station. 

“Hey. I was listening to that.” The complaint from the driver’s seat is annoyed but without any real heat. 

Michael keeps twisting the knob, not looking at his companion, skipping over white noise in search of something - anything - else. “We’ll find something else. Can’t stand Billy Idol.”

Even though Michael knows it’s not actually possible, it feels as if the temperature inside the car drops several degrees. Shock reverberates across the link between Michael and David loud enough that it bounces Michael’s brain around inside his skull, forcing him to turn his head away from the radio towards the blond as he continues to spin the dial. 

David appears downright scandalized as he stares back at Michael, eyebrows making friends with his hairline. “You can’t stand Billy Idol?”

Michael nods, head tilting at David, confused by the obvious annoyance rolling off of him. 

And also a little worried by how long David has kept his eyes from the road, regretting having let the blond take over driving duties at the last gas station. “Uh, yeah. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Can you watch the road, David? Don’t feel like getting up close and personal with the guardrail.”

David sneers, but turns his head back to the road, grumbling incoherent words beneath his breath that, try as he might, Michael can’t pick out. 

Not that it matters, as when an audible sentence finally does work its way up and out, Michael’s still as confused as when all he’d heard was gibberish. “I’ve made a mistake.”

Michael frowns. “With what?”

“Making you immortal. I can’t spend eternity with someone who doesn’t appreciate Billy Idol.”

Michael snorts, his hand dropping away from the dial when he locates something less detestable to listen to. The fast pace guitar chords and beats of Mötley Crüe playing through the speakers as a backdrop, he leans back in his seat, head angled towards David, the better to watch the exaggerated play of disgust on his lover’s face. “Too late. No take backs.” 

David’s frown deepens, but there’s a twitch at the corners of his mouth, like he’s fighting the upward tug of a smile. “Never too late for anything, Michael.”

Michael smirks at him, stretching his legs out and dragging his tongue across his bottom lip in a deliberate attention grabbing move that pulls David’s eyes straight to his mouth. “Yeah. Right. After how hard and long you fought for me?” Michael drags the words out with dirty intent. Feeling playful, and eager to wash away the lingering remnants of that earlier time, of that earlier life. He draws upon more recent, much more pleasurable memories, letting them hover at the front of his mind. The spike of lust that floods the air between them all the proof he needs that David’s on the same page. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” 

“So damn sure of yourself, aren’t you?” The question is spoken with careful neutrality that does nothing to disguise the visceral want pouring off of David.  

A growl thrums across Michael’s vocal chords. “Pull over. Let’s find out.”

David does.

And they both forget all about Billy Idol. 

Abba “Fernando” 

Sated and settled back in the passenger seat on the road south, David knows what song it is from just the first couple of notes. He has no intention of subjecting himself to it, so he reaches for the dial only to have his hand smacked away by Michael. Shocked, he looks up at the man behind the wheel, the driver’s blue eyes alight with mischief as he starts to sing along with the music while David watches on in horror. “No. No absolutely not. Turn it off. Right now.”

But Michael’s hand stays covering the dial as his voice gets stronger. When he hits the title lyric he leans heavily away from the wheel in David’s direction and croons it in his face. David’s frozen in place by the disturbing sight. “Why do you even know the lyrics?”

‘You’ve met my mother and my brother, you honestly think I wouldn’t know the lyrics?’ The thought jumps from Michael’s mind to David’s, but Michael’s singing voice doesn’t falter at all as he sings about crossing the Rio Grande.

Under any other circumstances, David would be damn proud of Michael that his ability for telepathic multi-tasking has come along so far, but as is, he’s too distressed to feel much of anything else.

“Is this a method of torture? Is that why you’re doing this? Testing the waters? Because if so, bravo. Very effective. But it’s time to stop now.” 

Michael cackles. Cackles! As he smacks David’s hand away from the dial again, the sound bleeding into an off-key “Liberty” with a devilish grin upon his face as he turns the volume up.

David sinks as deep into the leather bench seat as is possible, all the way against the door, trying to put distance between himself and the… horror happening on the other side of the car. “Just stake me. It would hurt less.”

The gleam in Michael’s eyes is pure evil as he sways towards David again, all his earlier concern for road safety seeming forgotten in his Abba-induced haze. 

He manages to keep the car between the painted lines and away from any ditches as the song comes to an end - though it weaves a considerable amount. The smile on his face when he looks David’s way on the final note is wide and brilliant and blinding. Pleasant waves of giddy happiness echoing across the bond so strongly, that David’s own treacherous emotions race to sync up with those of his tormentor.

David hates himself a little for being so far gone on the bastard, but the shared laughter that fills the car between them feels good all the same.

Deep Purple “You Keep On Moving”

Another tank, another station, another song.

Michael smiles as the beat of a tune he never hears getting radio airplay hits his ears. He drums his fingers against his knee, mouthing along to the lyrics and bouncing his leg in time. Thinking it might be fun to finally learn how to play something other than his kneecap. The drums, or the guitar even. Or hell, why not both? He’s got nothing but time now, right? Why shouldn’t he spend it learning how to play a dozen instruments if he wants?

David speaks up when the song hits the third verse and Michael’s halfway through an imaginary worldwide tour as the next biggest drummer since Bonham. “Paul had a copy of this album.” He chuckles, once, the sound dark and heavy. “Two copies, actually. One he’d worn down to nothing. Sounded like garbled shit, but it was the only one he’d play. Said he was keeping the other ‘for posterity’ or something.”

Michael returns from his European stage debut and looks to David, trying to judge the meaning behind the story. The other man offering up information on the absent boys so rare, that he figures there must be a reason for it.

There’s not much light to illuminate him, the dash on the old vehicle mostly dark, but Michael’s eyes don’t need much light to see by these days. Not that it matters, as there’s nothing to read on the blond’s face, his expression that disconnected mask that Michael’s grown so familiar with in the past year.

“Think he bought the first one on account of the cover, but turned out he liked the music too.” David’s voice is muted - not so soft as to be wistful, but a next door neighbor to it maybe.

Michael digs through his brain, trying to recall what the cover looked like, but comes up empty. He prods at David for some help, snorting when David reproduces in Michael’s mind the image of the band’s disembodied heads floating in a wine glass of dark red liquid, with the tagline ‘Come Taste the Band’ scrolled over the top. He guffaws at the sight. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Paul was always easily amused.” The comment is said with a quiet intensity that peters out to a heavy silence, despite the song still rocking through the car.

It leaves Michael feeling like he’s intruding on something he shouldn’t be. He inches back and forth in his seat, tapping the leather seating between the two of them instead of his knee. “You, uh, you want me to change it?”

David glances at Michael, the expression on his face a little mournful, but not despondent or angry as it may have been in the past. “Nah. It’s a good song. Let it play.” 

Michael nods once, and the song plays on.

Fleetwood Mac “Landslide”

“…”

“…”

“I - you can change it if you want.”

“Course I can.”

“…”

“…”

“Are you gonna change it or…”

“Nah. Took too long to find this station. Probably just be static everywhere else.”

“Yeah. You’re probably right. So…we leave it then?”

“Might as well. It’ll be over soon.”

“Okay.“ Michael takes a deep breath, uncertain about what he’s about to say, but unable to stop himself. “This was Star’s-”

“I know.”

“And you still don’t mind-”

“No. Should I?” The questions is flat. Unconcerned, but Michael doesn’t miss the way David’s face tightens when he asks it. 

Michael moves his right shoulder in an awkward shrug. “Just got the impression you didn’t care for her much.”

David makes a low humming sound. “Liked her well enough at first. Liked her a whole lot less later on.”

Michael doesn’t have a ready response for that, knowing damn good and well why David’s feelings towards Star changed. 

“You heard from her lately?”

Michael whips his head towards David, surprised by the question.“No. I haven’t.“ 

David hums again, fingers flexing on the steering wheel as he does. “Sure about that?”

“When exactly do you think I would have talked to her, David?”

“No clue. It’s why I asked.”

Michael thinks that’s a lie, but doesn’t call David on it. Instead, he settles back, letting Stevie Nicks serenade them for a few verses before offering what little he does know. “She calls my Mom sometimes. They…talk.” David’s gaze stays firmly on the road, though Michael can feel the way tension thrums through his frame. “Think she’s still with Laddie, wherever they went. I don’t - I haven’t spoken to her since she left.” It’s the truth, but for some reason it feels like a lie.

“She took Laddie back to his father I take it?”

Michael gives a noncommittal bounce of his head. “Think so.”

“Hmm. Maybe we should pay them a visit.”

Michael lets out a low laugh at the comment. “Doubt we’d be welcome.”

A sly smile that Michael knows can’t mean anything good lifts the corner’s of David’s mouth. “Never know if we don’t try. Could pencil it sometime after Phoenix.”

Michael rolls his eyes, knowing he’s being baited and not about to be caught. “Yeah sure. Why the hell not?” Michael smirks at the way David’s forehead scrunches up at the easy agreement. He means it - he’s curious enough about where Star ended up and what she’s been doing that visiting her isn’t the worst idea he’s ever heard - though he’s not so much of an idiot that he doesn’t know that David’s reasons for wanting to see her are far from benign.

No longer in the mood for the song, Michael changes the station.

Billie Holiday “You’re My Thrill”

David hums as he twists the dial through station after station of white noise. He spins it past an old jazz tune, but then twirls it back again, making an appreciative noise as a crooning female voice starts to spill from the speakers.

Satisfied with his find, he slouches back into the leather upholstery, eyes closed and an almost dream-like smile on his face.

From his spot in the driver’s seat, Michael goggles at him. “Seriously?”

“Michael Emerson, if the next words out of your mouth are that you don’t like Billie Holiday either, I’m leaving you at the next truck stop and you can find your own way back to Santa Carla. I don’t care how close to sunrise it is.”

The way his voice doesn’t falter when he says it brings Michael up short, making him think that it may be more than just an idle threat. (Not that Michael would let him leave him behind without a fight, but that’s beside the point).

Michael manages to keep his mouth shut for a cool twenty seconds, during which he watches David out of the corner of his eye. Watches as the bleached-blond, spiky-haired murderous vampire clad all in black - not a small amount of it leather, hell, there are spurs on his boots for Chrissakes - quietly enjoys the old-fashioned song. The disconnect between the image he presents and the one the song evokes makes Michael laugh. “Damn, what decade are you from, Old Man?”

“The seventies, Michael.”

Michael snorts, rolling his eyes. Not that David can see him with his own eyes enjoying the view behind their lids. “Yeah sure. You’re younger than me. Explains the occasional tendency to throw tantrums still.” 

“The eighteen-seventies, Michael.” David says, calm and cool and not at all joking.

Michael’s hands on the wheel jerk sideways in surprise, sending the car swerving over the line before he can yank it back where it belongs. David’s eyes crack open at the disturbance, leveling a glare at Michael, but he doesn’t react otherwise. “Seriously?”

David smirks at him, slipping the cigarette he had stowed behind his ear down and to his mouth. He doesn’t give Michael an answer, just flicks his lighter open and sets flame to the stick, puffing on the end to get it to light, and settles back into his seat, eyes half-closed.

Michael molls the unexpected tidbit of information over in the space between verses. One particular thought standing out in greater relief against the rest. “Shit…you’re older than my Grandpa. By a lot.”

“I am. And if you want to be too one day, shut it and let me enjoy the song!” 

It’s only the lingering shock of the information that keeps Michael quiet. It has nothing to do with the amber gleam in David’s eyes.

Really.

Besides, as far as old-as-sin songs go, it’s not half-bad. 

Starland Vocal Band “Afternoon Delight”

Approximately one point five seconds into the song, David’s hand meets Michael’s as they both reach for the dial. David growls, fangs dropping. “I will break your hand, your arm, and all your fingers if you try and stop me from changing the station, Michael.”

Michael’s hand raises up in the air in a placating gesture that David doesn’t trust. At all. “Hey! I was trying to change it too.”

“Sure you were.” David twists the dial, spinning it through endless seas of static and snowstorms and a whole lot of absolutely nothing else.  

“I was.” Michael’s voice is pleading, but there’s mischievous glint in his eyes that doesn’t match the sound.  

David gives him a sideways glare. “Somehow, I don’t believe you.”

Michael breathes out a heavy-handed sigh. “So little trust. And here I thought we’d really been getting somewhere this past year.”

David rolls his eyes. “You forfeited all rights to musical trust after that horrendous ‘Mamma Mia’ sing-along.

“Hey! First off, it was ‘Fernando’, and second: you enjoyed that. You were smiling. I saw you.”

“That was a defense mechanism, Michael.”

“Liar.”

Which is true, but David’s not about to admit it. So he ignores him, and stops the dial on a patch of white noise; settling back in his seat to enjoy the scratchy sound of absence.

Less than a minute of quiet passes between them before Michael’s hand inches for the radio. David’s voice is curated calm when he says: “Try me, Michael.” 

“Idle threat.”

“When have you ever known me to be idle, hmm?”

Michael scoffs, giving David a tilted smile that tells the elder vampire just how little Michael thinks of David’s threats. “Go ahead, tell me all the ways that you’re gonna torture me if I change the station. What’s it gonna be this time? Something more creative than holy water dipped knives, I hope?”

“You ever heard of ‘torpor,’ Michael?” David asks, dipping into the darker part of his psyche. To the blackened memories of his early life under Max’s so-called-care. Fully intending to shower Michael with the visual of being trapped - buried - deep beneath the earth in a impenetrable box, screaming for his maker to let him out. To let him go. Screaming until his throat runs dry, and the blood in his veins slows to a trickle. Skin gone paper-thin, and ashen. So desperate to be released that he’ll say anything. Do anything.

David doesn’t plan to exact such a punishment on Michael of course, but he’s not above a little mental torment. Especially not after being trapped in a car for two-hundred plus miles with Michael and his previously undocumented love of country music and disco.

But before David can so much as conjure up an image of a box or a handful of dirt, Michael frowns in his direction. “Don’t think so. That a New Wave group or something?”

A surprised bark of laughter bursts out of David, amused eyes latching onto Michael. “What? No, it’s-” He shakes his head, small peels of laughter leaking out of him as he does. David’s laughter grows in time with Michael’s confusion. The uncertain look upon the younger vampire’s face endearing to David in a way that it has no right to be.

David shakes his head, his plans to teach Michael a lesson forgotten. “You know what, never mind.”

A frown stays planted on Michael’s face for a while longer, the confusion fading at a snail’s pace. But he drops the subject, and the two of them drive on in silence. 

A silence that lasts for the length of time it takes Michael to forget why the radio was off in the first place.

But David hasn’t. So really, it’s Michael’s fault that David launches at him, teeth bared, and the car is sent skidding off the road.

At least there aren’t any guardrails to hit. 

And if the only casualty of the accident ends up being the radio, well, they were do for an upgrade anyway.

Preferably one with a cassette deck. 

~End

[fuckyeahevanrwood]

The Road Less Traveled: Westworld’s Evan Rachel Wood does nothing by the book

Evan Rachel Wood can ride a horse and shoot a rifle at the same time. She can’t tell you why she knows how to do that—while wearing a prairie dress, playing a character that is a robot, and galloping through the Utah desert for the HBO series Westworld, now in its second season. She just does it.

It’s the same with acting, in general, which the 30-year-old has been doing since she was 5. She can’t explain it. She does it.

“It’s an energetic thing, I don’t know. My senses are different,” Wood says over a lunch of scrambled eggs at a bar in Silver Lake. “I have terrible fine motor skills, but I can shoot a scene on a horse with a gun in one take. I have synesthesia, which means that I can hear color and feel sound. I thought everyone experienced the world that way. I’m fascinated by the way our brains work, and I was reading about psychology and learned about what synesthesia was, and I thought, ‘Wait. Other people don’t feel that?’”

Even if you haven’t seen her eerie performance as Westworld’s Dolores (which earned her both Golden Globe and Emmy nods), living a preprogrammed life in a sort of alternate-reality game where wealthy players get to act out twisted Old West fantasies among androids, chances are Wood has left a lasting impression on you from a different role. Starting with a few dramas on television (among them Once and Againand the original American Gothic) and her breakout role as a troubled teen in Catherine Hardwicke’s 2003 film Thirteen, Wood has had an intense, often smoldering and mature on-screen presence for two decades. She played Mickey Rourke’s daughter in The Wrestler, a promiscuous intern in George Clooney’s The Ides of March and the vampire queen of Louisiana in True Blood. In person, Wood does not present as a boldly provocative movie star. Wearing wide-leg faded jeans, a striped T-shirt, tortoiseshell glasses and Vans, her hair in a reddish bob, you might guess that she is a manager at Urban Outfitters. She looks younger than she is, which she credits to sunscreen (La Roche-Posay). And though she spent her adolescent years living and attending acting classes in the San Fernando Valley, she now prefers the vibe on the east side of Los Angeles, where she spends time with her friends, mostly fellow musicians (she’s a singer) and actors. And when she isn’t working here in town, or on the Westworld set near Moab, she calls Nashville, Tenn., home.

“Los Angeles can be too intense for me,” she says, explaining that she wants her son, who is 4 (his father is Wood’s ex, actor Jamie Bell), to have some space to be a kid, both literally and figuratively. “I feel like I’m always working here, even just walking down the street. Nashville is great because there are so many creative people there who are working and doing cool things, but nobody cares what you do. Or if they do, they’re lovely about it. I didn’t buy a farm or anything, but I have a yard and a guesthouse. There’s nature and a community. I wanted all of that for my son. I was just a couple of years older than he is when [my career] really started. And it’s weird to think about how short his life has been, and that is the only amount of time I had before I became an actor. I really like my life, the good and the bad of it, but I wouldn’t let my son do it.”

When you watch performers grow up on screen, you can see how their choices shape them, and see who they are becoming based on the roles they take. Wood was raised in a North Carolina theater that her father ran surrounded by a “melting pot” of cultures, personalities and sexualities, and she has been working steadily for 25 years. At first, with her long, straw-blond hair and fair skin, she was cast as a thoughtful, serious daughter. Then, as she matured, she understood that her tastes were more eccentric. (You may remember that she was in a long-term relationship with Marilyn Manson.)

“I’ve never wanted to go down the road everyone else was going down,” she says. “I wanted to go down the alleys and learn about the people who were different, talk to the weirdos and know their stories. I don’t always play dark characters. I mean, I’ve done comedies. But the darker roles are what people tend to remember.”

Her latest big-screen role is Laura, a psychologically complicated cleaning woman who has a tangled family life and intense sexual encounters with strangers, in a film called Allure. Laura is a woman who is hard to like, who manipulates, traps and tortures a 16-year-old piano prodigy with a difficult home life of her own. Originally, the role was written for a man, by Canadian writer-director team Carlos and Jason Sanchez.

“Then they gender-swapped it, which is when they approached me,” Wood says. “That was intriguing to me, that this role was now female, which you don’t really see, and it did explore these kinds of situations in a way that I hadn’t quite seen before—from the eyes of two women. My biggest fear was that I wasn’t going to be a believable abuser, because I didn’t want to traumatize anyone. I think because I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager, I become very protective of younger actors.”

Since Wood publicly came out as bisexual in 2011, she has embraced her voice as an advocate for LGBT civil and women’s rights. She writes essays for Nylon magazine and speaks frankly about changing social mores surrounding sexual identity in our culture. Wood received the Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award at the 2017 North Carolina Gala, where she gave a candid speech about the importance of “representing the underrepresented.” Recently, she testified before Congress about her own history with sexual assault, detailing some truly horrific experiences but refusing to name her assailants, to protect herself from potentially draining court battles.

She experiments with androgyny in her personal style, gravitating more toward sleek, tailored suits and what she calls a “futuristic,” modern aesthetic with stylist Samantha McMillen. She has also written a couple of screenplays and started exploring paths behind the camera, mainly as a director. In the meantime, Westworld is more than enough to keep an active brain like Wood’s occupied. (And, as of season three, she is receiving equal pay to her male co-stars.)

“You can watch the show and go along with it, or you can put your detective hat on and try to figure it out. That’s what I love to do. I have a pretty good idea what it’s about. But there’s no way to really figure out this season. I read the final script and I said, ‘I have a couple of questions. First, what exactly is this?’”

The questions the show’s creators, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, ask about the origin of consciousness, and the potential for artificial intelligence to outpace its human creators, are interesting enough to keep the cast (which includes Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright and Anthony Hopkins) and the audience on their toes. It doesn’t hurt that there’s plenty of nudity.

“It’s not even weird anymore,” laughs Wood. “We’ve all been naked so often that it’s just normal. I show up to work and say, ‘OK, I’m naked in a lab. And Anthony Hopkins is here.’ It’s so surreal there isn’t even time to bestressed.”

And now that Wood is 30, she’s no longer the “baby” in the group and there is less pressure for her to prove herself time and again. She has experience, but still feels like she has a lot to learn.

“People listen to me differently now,” says Wood, and she understands what her older colleagues have been trying to tell her all of these years.

“Growing up as a child actor, I heard about regrets a lot,” she says. “I had a lot of people telling me not to live with regret. They drilled into my head how short and precious life is, so I made sure I didn’t care what anyone else thought.”

And, like everything else Wood does with convincing ease, when she says this, you believe her.

[crystalracing]

Under the skin of the enigmatic Raikkonen

KIMI RAIKKONEN IS ONE OF THOSE BLOKES WHO polarises opinion, that people seem to either love or hate. Ironic really, considering he is the epitome of getting on with doing his own thing, not manipulating anything, staying clear of boring politics and not worrying about things he has no control over. As a private man who can be difficult to read – not to mention one who a proportion of Formula 1 followers think has passed his best –he is, as our cover suggests, F1’s enigma. Which is why Ben Anderson’sin-depth 14-page feature, beginning on page 14, is probably the best and most-balanced thing you’ll ever read about him. Based on interviews with Raikkonen himself and those around him, it properly assesses his role on the F1 grid, and in the paddock. Ferrari announced a one-year contract extension for Raikkonen on Tuesday – after the last page of our feature had gone to press – but one thing for sure is that he is closer to the end of his F1 career than the beginning, and this week’s Autosport also provides a study of a talent at the opposite end of the spectrum. There hasn’t been a buzz this big about a young British prospect since Lewis Hamilton was rising the ranks, and Kevin Turner’s chat with Lando Norris (p28)tells us all about his cracking recent F1 test with McLaren. It was good timing that the interview coincides with two more wins in the Formula 3 European Championship at Zandvoort (p40). Funny to think that Norris hadn’t even been born when Raikkonen made his Formula Renault UK debut in 1999, and was only a toddler when Kimi first raced a Formula 1 car…

“IF YOU STRUGGLE, PEOPLE SLAG YOU OFF, BUT IT DOESN’T BOTHER ME”

It is very rare that a driver comes along who challenges preconceived notions of what it takes to be a Formula 1 driver. But when a true prodigy breaks through into grand prix racing through sheer force of talent, they often create a sort of butterfly effect.The world we thought we knew before is suddenly changed, and will never be the same again. Kimi Raikkonen should go down in F1 history as one such driver. It has taken Max Verstappen’s remarkable recent ascension to motorsport’s pinnacle to further redefine the boundaries of possibility – so successful in one season of junior single-seater racing that he simply must be in F1 immediately. Since 2015, Verstappen has been thrilling fans, threatening reputations, and rewriting rules with his fearless and superlative brand of racing. Fourteen years earlier, Raikkonen laid the template –arriving with Peter Sauber’s eponymous team after a brief but highly successful stint in Formula Renault. Raikkonen had competed in fewer than 25 car races; surely he couldn’t be ready for such a monumental leap.Yet there he was – 13th on the grid for his debut in Australia, within four tenths of a second of sophomore team-mate Nick Heidfeld, scoring a point in his first GP, finishing not much more than 12 seconds behind his team-mate. Raikkonen looked immediately like he belonged – a driver so naturally gifted he could bypass F3 and F3000 completely, turn convention on its head, yet be immediately and properly competitive in F1. Truly astounding. The question with all prodigies, in any sport, is what next? Will they fully harness that ability, show the necessary will and dedication to ally proper craft to their genius, and transform themselves into a truly unstoppable force? It is this unique blend that tends to define the ultimate greatness of an athlete – whether they burn out early and fade away in the Wayne Rooney style, or evolve into an era-defining machine in the mould of Cristiano Ronaldo. Raikkonen’s stats suggest he’s something of an underachiever. This weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix will mark his 263rd grand prix start; only four drivers – Rubens Barrichello, Michael Schumacher, Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso – have started more. For a driver of Raikkonen’s ability and longevity to have scored ‘only’ 20 wins and 17 pole positions, plus a single world championship achieved in fortuitous circumstances in 2007, seems out of kilter. Damon Hill would not consider himself to be the most naturally gifted driver ever to grace F1. Raikkonen could make that claim, yet Hill achieved more wins and poles than Raikkonen has, in much less than half the number of starts. And yet Raikkonen is still good enough that he is still racing for Ferrari – F1’s grandest team – at the ripe old age of 37, and Tuesday’s announcement that he will remain for 2018 means he will continue doing so for another season at least. That shows Raikkonen still has something serious to offer in the eyes of those who make the biggest decisions in Maranello. Sport is always about much more than pure numbers. Personality and style also count for as much sometimes. Raikkonen commands a strong and loyal fan base, energised by his ‘Iceman’ reputation, one he says he’s done nothing conscious to cultivate. Publicly, Raikkonen comes off as a cool, aloof, anti-hero character – a no-nonsense antidote to the clean-cut corporate image of modern racing. His ‘wild-child’ early years curry him huge favour with those followers of F1 who pine for the era of James Hunt, when drivers partied away the nights and drove by the seat of their pants in the day. But even lovable rogues like Hunt and Raikkonen are driven by a fierce competitive instinct that belies their devil-may-care reputations.We are left with a confusing picture. How to reconcile the incredible natural ability that once redrew boundaries at Sauber and McLaren, and claimed a historic post-Schumacher world championship for Ferrari, with the later seasons of struggle: bettered by Felipe Massa, outpaced by Romain Grosjean, destroyed by Alonso, now playing second fiddle to Sebastian Vettel? Herein lies the enigma of Kimi Raikkonen.

BLAZING A TRAIL AT SAUBER

Raikkonen’s first season in F1 was very strong by conventional standards for a rookie, but when you consider his fundamental lack of experience in car racing it was truly exceptional. His results were very good – four points finishes in total, twice finishing fourth (in Austria and Canada) and placing inside the top 10 in the world championship. Raikkonen made a vital contribution to what then constituted Sauber’s best F1 season, but it was his raw speed that caught the eye. Third time out, Raikkonen qualified only a tenth behind Heidfeld in Brazil, and thereafter matched his more experienced team-mate 7-7 on Saturdays. Not only that, Raikkonen performed with a calm assuredness that belied his lack of experience. “Kimi was very young [21] and not experienced at all – it was very risky,” says Sauber driver trainer Josef Leberer, who worked with Ayrton Senna at McLaren and recalls his season alongside Raikkonen with fondness. “A lot of people said, ‘I don’t understand why Sauber were doing this’. But it worked. “He’s not the kind of guy who sits days and hours on the computer. Such an intuitive driver, his instinct is incredible. This way I would say he’s one of the best. It comes naturally. No bullshit. Just wanna be fast, no excuses. “He was not spoiled, so you could talk with him and be straightforward, and he was an incredible, cool guy. Doing the massage in the morning we had to wake him up and he said, ‘Let me get an extra five minutes of sleep before the race’. I’d never seen this – the second race in Malaysia and he wanted to sleep an extra few minutes! Can you imagine being like this in your second race? “He made such an impact. We had a feeling and he was fast immediately. You could see he had the requirements to be a top driver.” Raikkonen’s extraordinary ability to drive an F1 car quickly without the educational foundation enjoyed by his peers left a lasting impression on the paddock. Renowned motor racing journalist and author David Tremayne was Sauber’s press release writer during Raikkonen’s rookie campaign. He recalls a driver aloof and reserved in public, but completely different when hidden from the glare of a camera lens. “He was very quiet, like he is now,” explains Tremayne. “You thought, ‘What is this kid like, is he going to be another Mika [Hakkinen]?’ But he clearly wasn’t in terms of the way he conducted himself – he wasn’t forthcoming. Kimi didn’t want to do any of the other bollocks. He wanted to get in the car and get on with it. “[But] at Monza I heard all this raucous laughter on top of the media bus at Sauber. I went downstairs and it was Kimi, Peter Collins, and a guy who turned out to be Kimi’s kart mechanic – and it was Kimi doing all the laughing. “It was the only time I ever saw what you might call ‘the real Kimi’– with mates, completely relaxed, no need to be protective of anything.

I think he has the ability to compartmentalise. There was a lot of fire in him but you didn’t get to see it. He’s very self-reliant. I don’t think he needs an entourage. “As a driver, he was wonderful to watch. Felipe came in the following year and he was quick but always on a different line. Kimi was just cool and calm with it – not pushing the car or wrestling with it.”So many drivers dream of being world champion, work hard to achieve that dream, but never even make it onto the grid. Others carve out opportunity but become overwhelmed by expectation or consumed by pressure. It seems Raikkonen benefited not only from exceptional natural ability behind the wheel – after all there are many drivers who share that sort of skill – but also a mental resilience and confidence that helped strip away the extra burdens that might have destroyed someone of a different character. Raikkonen never dreamed big or got carried away by the prospect of fame and fortune. It seems it was this aloof attitude, bordering on indifference, that made him so perfectly suited to thrive in F1. “It was a good team to be in; nice people – I still have lunch there,” Raikkonen tells Autosport, relaxing into his seat as we discuss the first stage of his long career in F1. “For me, it was very easy in someways because I didn’t really expect anything.“I didn’t know anything about F1. I never went to see a race. The first time I saw it live was when I was in a test myself. So for me it was like if you just go to Formula Renault [for the first time]. I had nothing to worry about – what’s the point? It either goes well or it goes bad. What can you do?” Ultimately, it went very well indeed for Raikkonen, who made such an impression that he was poached by Ron Dennis to replace retiring double world champion Hakkinen at McLaren for 2002. Even a wunderkind like Verstappen had to wait four races into his second season before earning promotion to one of F1’s biggest teams… 

McLAREN: WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN  

Some paddock insiders consider Raikkonen’s five-year stint at McLaren to be his absolute peak. His first grand prix victory at Malaysia in 2003 briefly made him F1’s youngest winner since team founder Bruce McLaren. Raikkonen won eight more times for McLaren in those five seasons, as well as taking 11 pole positions and 36 podiums from 87 starts. He quickly established himself as one of grand prix racing’s most exciting stars, but a world championship title eluded him. He was second to Alonso in 2005, but came closest to breaking through two years earlier, when Raikkonen lost out to Schumacher by just two points. “Back in those days he was massively quick,” recalls Pat Fry, McLaren’s chief engineer during Raikkonen’s stint with the team. “It’s a shame car reliability and engine reliability didn’t work for him really. If you look at him through the early 2000s, he was right up there with the best, wasn’t he? He was absolutely outstanding driving the McLaren through 2003, 2005. He should’ve won the championship in 2005.” Raikkonen was unfortunate in that his time at McLaren coincided with Schumacher’s most dominant seasons at Ferrari and latterly the brief but potent rise of Alonso at Renault. Only once during that period, in ’05, could McLaren be considered to have produced the absolute quickest car on the grid, and senior personnel admit it was too unreliable to ultimately get the job done. In this context, Raikkonen achieved much of his success against the odds. Apart from his first year with the team in 2002 – when he was paired alongside stalwart David Coulthard – Raikkonen was never beaten by his McLaren team-mate across a season. He won many admirers inside the squad for his fearless style of racing. “He was blindingly quick – sometimes the circuit wasn’t big enough to contain him in those early days, but he was pushing to the max and everyone liked it,” remembers McLaren’s chief operating officer Jonathan Neale. “He used to scare me. He scared me because he was so completely fearless. You just knew there was no way he was going to give anything less than 110%, and I don’t mean that lightly. He was just a force of nature.” Out of the car, McLaren found a “completely uncompromising” driver, whose “maverick” style didn’t always sit well with the team’s clean-cut corporate image. “We struggled to find out who he was as he didn’t say very much,” adds Neale. “[But] everybody underestimates him at their peril. He did have a fantastic sense of humour. If there were two drivers going on stage, to do a presentation or a question-and-answer session, he’d be sitting in the back and he’d do an amazing mimic. He had the voices and the phrases, all of that, so he was a sharp observer. “There was never a dull moment, but he was a great racer –somebody who is still spoken of highly in the team for what did with us, for us, and the style in which he did it, which was uncompromising. It was uncompromising in the car, it was uncompromising in the set-up, he was uncompromising on whether he wanted to be with a sponsor. It’s not always easy, but isn’t it refreshing when you find somebody who is brave enough to be candid and frank and not prepared to cower to conformity?

“He wouldn’t suffer fools. Everyone was taken at face value, no airs, no graces, nobody standing on ceremony, what you see is what get, very grounded, but enormous following with the mechanics and engineers – real loyalty. “Because that fire burns very intensely, it was kind of polarising –either you got it or you didn’t. It is quite difficult getting engineers close to him – to be able to have that rapport and reach him without being too much, too little, not a fool. “Any whiff of bullshit and you were toast! But [race engineer] Mark Slade was very good with Kimi and they had an understanding. Mark knew when to leave him alone, and when to push him and there were occasions when Mark was quite assertive with him, but because he built up that trust he could be. It is easy to be intimidated by somebody of that temperament.” Slade has worked with Raikkonen twice through the Finn’s F1 career – first at McLaren and later at Lotus. Slade responded well to Raikkonen’s no-nonsense attitude and fussiness for precision. He says the Raikkonen that drove for McLaren arrived at Woking “well-rounded” and was “massively impressive”. “He knew how to manage tyres, he knew how to set up the car – it was like working with someone who’d done it for five years,” Slade recalls. “He knew exactly what he wanted. It was not like working with a new driver. “The only aspect that was a little bit ragged early on was in qualifying, when we had to put the fuel in the car for the race, so 2003. He had a little bit of a tendency to want to be on pole regardless of the amount of fuel in the car. And there were a couple of races where he went off trying to achieve too much. “We basically banned him from watching the other drivers’qualifying laps. We just told him, ‘Go out and drive the car as quickly as it will go’. We did that for the rest of this season and he didn’t do any more mistakes.” Raikkonen is often portrayed as a lazy driver – someone who simply relies on his natural feel for the car but isn’t particularly interested in doing anything other than driving. Slade argues that’s a misunderstanding of Raikkonen’s approach. It’s not that he is uninterested, rather that he sees clear delineation in responsibilities within teams, and wants to trust those around him to do their jobs properly without interference. Slade admits this approach can compromise Raikkonen when internal politics arise.

“There were times at McLaren when things didn’t go the way they should have for Kimi and if he had been just a little bit more involved, that could have swapped things around a bit,” Slade says. “In the middle of 2005 there were certain things happening with the design direction of the car that didn’t suit Kimi and there was a lot of tension and pressure. I was having to fight Kimi’s corner, because he wasn’t really doing much himself. That was quite stressful. “He didn’t like hanging around in the office for very long. His debriefs were very short, but he gave us the important points and that was almost perfect for me, because it meant we didn’t spend lots of time talking about what was not relevant. He won’t rant about it. It’s just, ‘That’s what we need to fix’. Simple as that. “If people try to push him in a different direction, it’s not going to work because you need him on board. You need to be on board with him and he needs to be on board with you. For me, it was enjoyable to work with him, because it was logical and straightforward. “One of the biggest difficulties with drivers who are less consistent with their approach is trying to filter out this inconsistency. It becomes very difficult very quickly. If he came in saying there’s something wrong with the car, the chances are there’s something wrong with the car – even if you can’t see that on data. Ninety-nine percent of the time he’s right. “When we were doing Michelin tyre testing, they desperately wanted him to do the testing. They told us at one point that he was the best test driver that they worked with. They used to give a little array of tick boxes for different characteristics of the tyre – what the tyres were doing, what the characteristics of the different compounds were. They said there were some drivers who got most of the points correct, but he always got them all correct. “And his consistency of lap time when we tested eight different compounds – his baselines would be within one tenth, and that meant that they could properly analyse the lap time data as well as the driver’s comments.” Slade says he’s never seen anything else like Raikkonen’s “extraordinary level of sensitivity” to the car, to the point where Raikkonen could detect problems with McLaren’s traction control so aware the engineers couldn’t see in their trackside data. The chase for a ‘perfect car’ can be a real curse when too many things aren’t working correctly, but this degree of feel made Raikkonen a formidable weapon during F1’s tyre war between Bridgestone and Michelin. “That played a big part of how it went,” says Raikkonen. “I was very happy to do the tyre tests. We could test 20 different sets of tyres and choose exactly what you wanted, whatever you feel is best for you. It was one extra thing that you could use.” Raikkonen does not agree with those, such as Williams technical chief Paddy Lowe, who would say his McLaren years represent Raikkonen at his peak. But he was certainly unfortunate not to win at least one world title with McLaren, and Slade recalls some truly stunning drives by Raikkonen during that period. “No doubt Michael, Fernando and Kimi were the three guys,” argues Slade, who feels Raikkonen could have won “15 straight races” in 2005 with better reliability. “Then, just slightly behind, DC, [Juan Pablo] Montoya and a few others. When it came to the driving and his racecraft, Kimi was right up there.“In the middle part of the [2005] season the car was phenomenal and he was driving phenomenally well. At Monza, he qualified fastest with the full tank of fuel [before a grid penalty]; at Silverstone, he was half a second per lap quicker than Montoya, who won the race; in France he started 13th and finished second. Japan was awesome because he came from the back and won. “One of the best races he ever did was Indianapolis in 2003, when we were on the Michelin wets and the Michelin wets were rubbish. He finished second. It was fantastic. He just drove his heart out. He didn’t win the race, but it was an absolutely phenomenal drive. “Nurburgring 2006 – the engine was terrible that year and he finished fourth. I remember him coming to the bus afterwards, sweat pouring off him, and he said, ‘I just drove 60 qualifying laps’, and you could see he had. We knew he had to drive phenomenally well to achieve that with the car we had then.” By now Raikkonen had grown increasingly frustrated with life at McLaren and reputedly made an agreement with Ferrari as early as late-2005 to join the Scuderia for 2007. “He signed with Ferrari two years before he moved to Ferrari,” confirms his then-Ferrari team-mate Massa. “I remember when I signed for Ferrari, Kimi already has his contract; the only way I stay in Ferrari is if Michael stops.” Schumacher announced his first retirement from F1 after winning the 2006 Italian GP at Monza. Thus, the way was clear for Raikkonen and Massa to usher in a new era at Maranello.

MARK SLADE RAIKKONEN’S ENGINEER AT McLAREN AND LOTUS

Does Kimi have particular traits in his driving? He’s very, very smooth, very gentle, very precise – minimal inputs into the car. He wants the car to do the work. Most drivers tend to be a bit more aggressive with inputs, which can have benefits when the tyres are hard and difficult to get into the working window. The other thing is power steering. He came to us and complained about power steering. We spent a lot of time fixing it. Then he went to Ferrari and apparently complained about power steering there. Then he came back to Lotus and complained about power steering. So the feel of the steering is very, very important. He doesn’t want any friction in it. He doesn’t want any play on the brake pedal. Also, Mark [Arnall] always carried a special cloth to clean the windscreen, because if there was a slightest finger print or scratch, we had to change it.

He says he hates understeer and you often hear him complain about the front… Even at McLaren there were occasions where we did have issues. Canada was a good one in 2005. We were slower on new tyres than on used tyres because he couldn’t get the new tyre temperature to work. The start of the lap can be a real problem if he just hasn’t got the front grip that he needs to get the car into corners. I would say that’s probably the only real weakness. There were times also that was an advantage, because he was a lot more gentle on tyres. When we won the race with Lotus in 2013 in Melbourne, he just walked away with it because he could do one stop. Those tyres were absolutely perfect for him, then Pirelli changed the tyres and that disadvantaged him unfortunately.

Why does he often seem to make mistakes in qualifying? He takes a high-risk approach to qualifying. It’s all about corner entry speed. And if you get the corner wrong you tend to drop a lot of time. Other drivers probably prioritise the exit a little bit more. He’s trying to carry speed through; that is high risk. 

WORLD CHAMPION THEN DITCHED BY FERRARI

Raikkonen’s Ferrari career got off to a dream start – pole position and victory in his first race in Melbourne, and of course he went on to claim the championship as Ferrari backed his bid to overhaul the McLarens of Alonso and rookie sensation Lewis Hamilton. Raikkonen succeeded in this mission by a solitary point when team-mate Massa moved aside for him to win the season finale in Brazil.“For me it counts much more than any others – if I had won with McLaren or with somebody else,” Raikkonen says. “Ferrari is Ferrari.I got close a few times in the McLaren. I mean yes in some people’s eyes I [could] have won three championships. I didn’t deserve it.In the end, whoever gets the most points deserves it. “Would I be happier with three championships? It makes no difference. I am happy with what I have achieved.” It felt as though F1 almost owed Raikkonen that championship– regardless of the peculiar circumstances – as payback for the disappointment and near-misses at McLaren. But although he finally conquered the world in his first season as a Ferrari driver, Raikkonen never fully established himself as the team’s number one. Raikkonen says his biggest concern before coming to Ferrari was having to adjust to Bridgestone tyres after years spent honing his car on Michelin rubber, but according to Rob Smedley – Massa’s race engineer throughout Raikkonen’s first stint at Ferrari – the tyres were “never the limiting factor” for Raikkonen during this period.“In terms of raw talent he definitely was one of the best drivers on the grid when he came to us,” Smedley says. “[But] he very much needs a particular set-up. He needs the front to work for him very positively. He turns the car in very early, a little bit like Michael, like Fernando, like Valtteri [Bottas]. They turn very early in the corner, and due to that he’s very demanding on the front-end in that phase of the corner.“He needs to start sending the car into the apex almost immediately when he starts thinking about the corner, especially in medium-speed corners. When he first came to us, it took us a longtime to understand what he wanted. “He’s the driver who, probably the most I’ve ever seen of anyone, is absolutely and entirely unfazed by rear locking at the start of heavy braking. To be able to deal with that and not to be fazed by that is something quite incredible. “We spent a lot of our time in that winter of 2007 attempting to understand how on earth he was putting the brake balance so far rearward. He was running probably 8% more rearward than Felipe and the other drivers – that’s another planet. “We were quite surprised by that, but actually what he was trying to do, in his own way, was to make the car turn as soon as he asked for it.As soon as he asked for response out of the steering, he wanted the car to turn. He had a particular way of driving the car and I think it took us a little bit of time to understand that. Once we did, we got performance from him.” But not consistently. Raikkonen was closely matched with Massa through most of 2007, but would likely have been asked to support his team-mate’s own bid for the championship had Massa not suffered a damper failure while running ahead of Raikkonen in that year’s Italian GP – and narrowly leading Raikkonen in the standings. Massa, who describes Raikkonen as “for sure one of the strangest people I’ve met”, was a fan of the Finn’s honesty as a team-mate, but rates Schumacher and Alonso higher: “Definitely Michael and Fernando were stronger – not quicker, but more complete.” The following year Raikkonen was cast into the supporting role, as his title defence fell apart amid a run of four consecutive non-scoring races in the second half of the season. Massa was unlucky not to become world champion in ’08 and was Ferrari’s leading driver through the first part of a difficult 2009 campaign too, before he suffered a terrible head injury during qualifying for the Hungarian GP. “We never were really comfortable – like if you drive and you have to try and do things that are not normal,” says Raikkonen of his first stint at Ferrari. “We never really found it and put things together. We changed the cars a little bit, but we just struggled compared to what we did in the first bit.” Raikkonen showed flashes of form in a very difficult 2009 Ferrari, which was not a strong answer to the regulatory upheaval of the previous winter. He qualified on the front row and finished third at Monaco, but he wasn’t proving so relentlessly impressive as he had done in his McLaren years– against a team-mate not rated as one of the absolute best on the grid.

“In ’08 Felipe was still in the stage of rapid improvement and overall Felipe was pretty much quicker than him, definitely in qualifying,” adds Smedley, who reckons Raikkonen’s “pure natural talent” made him better than Massa at looking after the rear tyres in races.“That was one of the things that really surprised me, because I expected him to come in and be blisteringly quick but not really manage things in such a mechanically sympathetic way, and in fact the opposite was true. One of the strengths he’s always got is that he can take the tyres further than anybody else and, wherever he goes, the team tries to exploit that.“It’s never a matter of application with Kimi – you just plug him in and he just does it. You often wonder [what would happen] if he had the level of application of others with his level of natural skill and tenacity, [but] one thing you can say about him is that he doesn’t bring any politics. The guy is absolutely apolitical.“I think that comes a little bit from not being interested in this world. The thing that is really important to him is going racing on a Sunday afternoon, qualifying, trying to be better than anybody else. And all the other periphery bits do not interest him. “And that’s kind of where he probably differs to 99.9% of the rest of us in F1. You wake up thinking about it, you go to sleep thinking about it – much to the annoyance of my wife! But that’s how we are– constantly striving to do better and be the best. I don’t think Kimi has that. I mean, he likes it here, he comes and drives his car, then he goes home, and doesn’t think about it a great deal after that.” The feeling inside Ferrari was that Massa was establishing himself as the quicker driver, and that messed with Raikkonen’s head. Raikkonen’s form certainly picked up following Massa’s accident. Kimi was on the podium at Budapest, Valencia and Monza, and beat Giancarlo Fisichella’s Force India to victory at Spa. His performances were made to look all the more remarkable by how badly Massa’s stand-ins Luca Badoer (who qualified slowest of all at Valencia and Spa) and Fisichella (who took over after Spa) struggled. But it wasn’t enough for Ferrari, which elected to pay Raikkonen out of the final two years of his contract to bring Alonso on board for 2010. Raikkonen is still guarded about the events that unfolded behind closed doors at Maranello, but says he was keen to get out of F1 in any case. “I have nothing to hide really,” says Raikkonen, who originally never planned for a long career in F1. “That’s how it played out and I was happy at that point to say, ‘OK, that’s fine and I’ll go’. Honestly, somethings happen in life and I didn’t feel bad about it. Obviously, I had a contract, but that got dealt with. They obviously wanted something else at that point, and for me that’s how it goes sometimes. I wanted to do something else anyhow.”

RETURN FROM THE WILDERNESS

Raikkonen was temporarily done with F1, but F1 wasn’t done with him. Throughout his two-year stint experimenting in the World Rally Championship, proposals were made for his return. Eventually, Raikkonen realised he missed the joy of wheel-to-wheel competition so began thinking seriously about a comeback. He held talks with Williams – “I had a meeting with Toto [Wolff]; he came to my home” – and Lotus, before opting to make his comeback with the Enstone outfit.“The year before I got people asking me if I wanted to come back– there was a lot of talk but I felt if I want to come back I needed to have a current team that people will at least try to put the money into,” Raikkonen explains. “I didn’t need the money, but I wanted a car and a team that actually had some chances to do something good, rather than just being there.”Raikkonen enjoyed a superb first season with Lotus. He finished every one of the 20 races held in 2012, was on the podium seven times, and claimed a victory in Abu Dhabi – the infamous GP where he told the team to “leave me alone I know what I’m doing” over the radio while preparing for a safety car restart.Then-Lotus team principal Eric Boullier recalls a driver who was“a bit rusty over one lap” at first, but “brilliant” in the races, despite spending two seasons out of the game.“His capability and racecraft was amazing,” recalls Boullier.“The good thing for him [was] he had Grosjean near to him, and he [Grosjean] was very fast on one lap but not as good [overall].The most amazing thing about Kimi is he has a great understanding.He has a GPS in his head. He’s doing his own strategy, it’s amazing. ”Boullier recalls the 2012 Hungarian GP as the perfect example of Raikkonen’s craft, where the Finn came from the third row of the grid to beat Grosjean (who qualified on the front row) to second by saving his tyres and running longer in each stint. “You just have to guess sometimes what he wants, because he’snot the best communicator in the world,” Boullier adds. “Kimi gets quite stressed sometimes; he needs people who understand him and can handle him.“He is charismatic – actually, his charisma is strong enough to make people fans of him. What would be better would be to have more motivation to push people around him. He’s not as complete as maybe a Vettel, but he is a great driver. Some drivers need support. He’s one of the guys who can do it on his own. He’s incredibly talented.“He’s quite easy [to work with] to be honest – as long as you give him space to breathe and you’re not on his back all the time.

That was key – to let him live his life. ”Reuniting Raikkonen with Slade (who came across from Mercedes to work with Kimi again) also proved crucial in helping Raikkonen get the most from his comeback, and Lotus get the best out of Raikkonen. “When he first came back, he was really enthusiastic,” remembers Slade. “Unfortunately, he got messed around a bit on the salary side of things. That was an annoyance, but in terms of the driving, I felt he was still exactly the same. I don’t think it’s any secret that he’snot a big fan of the F1 paddock scene and the stuff that goes with it.”It seemed those two seasons of F1, racing on the most extremely fragile rubber of the Pirelli control tyre era, also suited Raikkonen’s particular skillset. Often he would score a big result by making fewer pitstops than his rivals, but Raikkonen himself reckons the design of that generation of Lotus – conceived by James Allison’s team around the Renault V8 engine and exhaust-blown downforce – made more of a difference, giving him the “pure front-end” grip he needs to drive well. Whatever, the combination gelled superbly. Raikkonen added eight more podiums to his tally in 2013, winning the first race of the season in Melbourne and finishing second six times. An unfortunate retirement at Spa that year (thanks to a visor tear-off blocking a brake duct) broke an incredible run of 27 consecutive points finishes stretching back to the Bahrain GP of 2012. “He’s relentless,” says Slade. “I’d say Fernando is the closest in terms of achieving consistent results.” But into the latter part of 2013, Grosjean began to establish himself as the stronger and generally faster of the two Lotus drivers,even though he was twice defeated by Raikkonen overall in the championship. Grosjean describes Raikkonen as “the perfect  benchmark” and says he learned a lot from racing alongside the Finn. “As team-mates we didn’t talk much – maybe three times in two years!” Grosjean says. “Everybody thinks he doesn’t give a shit; he actually does. He works. Same as Fernando – the only thing he thinks on Sunday is 2pm, how to get the car to where he wants it to go.“Once I had a rear soft spring for a race and Kimi tried it and liked it. He was pushing to get the springs. He was trying even though you think he doesn’t [care]. It was interesting that everybody thinks he [just] comes and drives the car and goes. He actually works. ”Their head-to-head record as team-mates is also skewed slightly by the fact Raikkonen skipped the final two races of 2013 – quitting the team over a financial dispute and electing to have surgery on a long-standing back injury, legacy of a testing accident during his first season in F1 at Sauber. “Unfortunately the whole thing [was] destroyed by people that, in my mind, were just stupid to be honest,” Raikkonen says. “They had a great thing on their hands. “It’s not my business, but I left there purely because I didn’t get paid. Without it, who knows? But then obviously I got the offer from Ferrari. I never had a bad feeling with them when I left, despite people thinking that. You know how people always think it will end in a mess, but they offered me a new deal and I went back.”

WHY RAIKKONEN OWES HIS SECOND F1 CAREER TO RALLYING AND NASCAR

Kimi Raikkonen’s two-year sabbatical from F1 in 2010-2011 led him to try his hand at other forms of motorsport he’d long wished to dabble in but never had the time to do so while fully absorbed into grand prix racing’s goldfish bowl. Having sampled Rally Finland in the summer of 2009, Raikkonen contested most of the 2010 World Rally Championship as part of the Citroen Junior Team, and nine rounds of the 2011 championship with a DS 3 run under his own ‘Ice 1 Racing’ banner. There were many incidents, but also many top 10s. “I always wanted to try the rally stuff, because it looks so difficult,”says Raikkonen. “I wanted to see how it would go and I was happy to have the help from Red Bull to do it. I still think it’s a great sport, it’s so difficult. The problem is that it needs time – experience counts a lot more in rallying than in circuit racing.“In rallying you have to put the same effort in driving, but you [also] have to listen to your co-driver. The most difficult thing is that you have to think about what he says and then react. That takes too much time. When that starts to happen automatically then you can go faster, then it gets easier.I was close to getting to that point,then things happened and I ended up back in F1. ”Raikkonen also travelled Stateside in 2011, to try his hand at NASCAR. He contested the lower-tier Nationwide and Truck series races at Charlotte, qualifying mid-pack for his Nationwide outing.It was this experience that refired Raikkonen’s enthusiasm for circuit racing and accelerated his F1 return. “Without that happening then I would definitely not be here today,”he says. “I would never have lasted this long if I hadn’t had a few years doing something else, trying things.

MARANELLO COMEBACK

It was during Raikkonen’s financial dispute with Lotus that he agreed a two-year deal to return to Maranello. Initially, it looked as though signing Raikkonen was the perfect insurance policy for Ferrari,which seemed in danger of losing Alonso after failing to carry the fight to Vettel and Red Bull in 2013. But despite publicly criticising the team and being admonished by company president Luca di Montezemolo, Alonso stayed put (for the moment) and he and Raikkonen became team-mates for 2014, as Massa departed for a fresh start at Williams. Raikkonen’s first season back at the Scuderia was a real struggle.The first year of F1’s current V6 hybrid turbo era was Ferrari’s least competitive since 1993. The car was bad, Raikkonen couldn’t adapt it to his driving style, and was demolished in the championship by Alonso, 161 points to 55. Jonathan Neale recalls how McLaren found its suspension development pulled “in two different directions” owing to Raikkonen’s demand for instant steering response from its cars, and Pat Fry, who was Ferrari’s chief engineer when Raikkonen returned in 2014, found his team coming up against an age-old problem – one exacerbated by stiff and hard Pirelli tyres that Raikkonen often struggled to get working for a single flying lap in qualifying. “He has a very smooth driving style – you’ve got to get rid of the understeer in the car,” says Fry. “You can obviously play around with suspension geometries and stuff like that to try and give him the feel,and sort out power-steering and all that stuff. ”The process was made trickier by Alonso’s long-standing presence as Ferrari’s number one driver, which inevitably led the team in a development direction that suited Alonso, before he departed for the ill-fated McLaren-Honda project.“In all the years I’ve worked with Kimi, the year I saw him struggle the most was that first year back at Ferrari,” says his long-time trainer Mark Arnall. “Coming from Lotus, where he had a good front-end on the car and had podium after podium after podium, it’s not like he suddenly forgot how to drive – he just couldn’t get a balance with that 2014 car.” But Raikkonen commanded the faith of technical director James Allison, with whom he worked at Lotus previously, and knew that he would have to play the long game at Ferrari to get back to where he needed to be.“I knew what I was getting into,” Raikkonen says. “With the engineers, I wouldn’t say they were bad – maybe the fit wasn’t what I wanted. It just didn’t work, I suppose, and our car was not very good.

“The front end has to be right there. If it’s not right, it’s not right,unfortunately. When it’s right things are very easy. Even when you have a good year, it’s a little percentage that’s perfect. There’s always something. There’s so many things that you have no control over.“Some days everything goes perfectly fine, and some days whatever you do it seems to be against you, but I’ve been long enough in the sport to know it. People look at you in one race and if you struggle they slag you off, but I’m used to it so it doesn’t bother me too much.“I want myself to do well and I know what I can do. That’s more important for me. Obviously, it’s not nice when you are in a team like Ferrari and the results are not coming, [but] I had no issues with them and I knew that things would turn out to be just fine with time. It just took some patience.” Raikkonen’s form has gradually improved since that annus horribilis, during which time the Ferrari senior management has changed, the technical structure has changed, the identity of his team-mate has changed, and so has his engineering group. Drafting in Dave Greenwood as his race engineer at the end of 2014 has made a massive difference for Raikkonen. “The car has been getting better and better every year, and a big part for me has been the people,” Raikkonen explains. “Dave is for sure one of the greatest guys that I have ever worked with. I would compare him with Slade – I very highly rate them. “For me it’s important that when we do something, everything has to be exactly like it should be. A very easy example: the ride height,if it’s [supposed] to be 20mm, it has to be 20mm; it can’t be 21mm or 19mm.“When everything is ‘close enough’, and you have five or six things like that, we all know in F1 how much difference small things make,then suddenly the lap time is not so perfect anymore.”Vettel has generally outperformed Raikkonen since arriving at Maranello in 2015, but their similar set-up demands and harmonious working relationship is helping drive Ferrari’s development in a single direction, and the Scuderia is now finally carrying the fight to Mercedes in the world championship – though it is Vettel leading the charge rather than Raikkonen. “Of all F1 drivers, he is probably closer to him [Vettel] than any of the others,” says Arnall, who arranged for Vettel to travel with Raikkonen on a private jet when Vettel was first in F1, and recalls Vettel’s rapid progression playing badminton against Raikkonen. “Kimi always liked Seb and I think Seb always liked Kimi. They are good friends – as much as you can be in this sort of environment. “The thing about Kimi is that he is not political at all, so I think to be a team-mate of, he is actually very easy as he doesn’t stir up any shit in the background – he is very transparent. Harmony in the team is something that is massively underrated. It makes a huge difference.”Paired alongside Vettel, Raikkonen’s own performances have steadily improved too, to the point where he has earned three contract extensions, which will keep him in F1 until after his 39th birthday.Questions about his ultimate speed and consistency remain, though, stoked further by occasional criticism from Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne, who has described Raikkonen as an occasional “laggard” in races. But Raikkonen’s pole position in Monaco proves he can still be faster than anyone when things are right, and his pernickety obsession with car set-up and tyre behaviour, plus the deep levels of valuable experience from F1’s tyre war era he can bring to bear in an age of severely limited testing, make him a valuable commodity, even if the price is the odd lacklustre performance.“I think Kimi is one of those guys that if he thought, ‘I just can’t drive one of these cars as quick as I used to’, he would stop,” reckons Arnall. “Kimi brings a shit load of experience,he’s very good with the development of the car, very non-political, an easy team-mate for people to have, so I think as an overall package,he is [still] very good.“I think his belief is that he can still compete near the top. He is very honest with himself – if he didn’t think that was the case, he’d stop.”Many would argue that he should have stopped a while ago, that his continuing presence on the grid, in such a coveted seat, is baffling when you consider he hasn’t been definitively quicker than any of his last four team-mates in F1. But what does Raikkonen himself think – does he believe he is as good a driver now as he ever was? “That’s so hard to say,” he replies. “I feel that I can drive as well as 2007 and 2001, or whatever people think has been my best ever [year]. For me, if I didn’t feel that I can drive well, or couldn’t win races or championships, I wouldn’t be here, because I don’t have interest to waste my own time and everyone else’s time. “I value my own time too much to use it on something that I wouldn’t be happy with, or that I wouldn’t think that I can actually do well. Plus, all the other people who would waste their time and money or on something that I just want to be part of. It’s not the most friendly place to be if you don’t really want to be…” That Ferrari continues to place its faith in Raikkonen suggests it feels, beyond the headline results and numbers, that he is still fundamentally among the very best drivers in the world, and that it recognises those deeper layers of style, character, substance and ability that make Raikkonen something more than the sum of his parts. He is enigmatic and mercurial, hasn’t been world champion for a decade, but clearly possesses extra qualities that F1’s biggest team finds are still worth investing in. He may lack the single-minded dedication of some of his peers,he may not be the out-and-out fastest driver on the grid anymore, he may well be too Button-esque in his over-reliance on particular car characteristics to drive quickly. He may not be as adaptable as some of his rivals, and F1 may only be a job to him, rather than an all-consuming obsession – but what’s wrong with being naturally gifted enough at your job that you don’t feel the need to take your work home with you every day?His critics will argue that’s not good enough, that Raikkonen has long outstayed his welcome. If Ferrari hands him another contract extension, they will no doubt be outraged if this enigma is given yet another lease of life. But one thing is for sure, Raikkonen will not care what they think. “I can live my life very happy,” Raikkonen says. “Obviously, my aim is to win races and I’m not happy when I’m not doing well. My biggest issue when I’m getting older is that I care too much. In the past, I didn’t care much. Now, when I have a bad weekend it’s more painful because I care more. Before it was still painful, but I got over it very quickly. “I never tried to be anything else than myself. If people like it, that’s good; if people don’t like it, that’s fine. As long as I’m happy what I’m doing, that’s my only interest. I’m not trying to please people because then I don’t live my life as I should. I live my life for myself. “I always said I have a life and that F1 is just a part of that. It’s not like F1 is all your life and then you have nothing. In my mind, I have the opposite. I mean F1, yes I love it and I enjoy doing it, but it’s not my life. My life is outside of it, and that’s how it should be.”

MARK ARNALL- RAIKKONEN’S LONG-TIME PERSONAL TRAINER

How does the Kimi of now compare to the Kimi you first knew back in 2001?

He didn’t really care too much about the PR stuff, he wasn’t interested in that glamour side of it, being famous, I think he would much rather be anonymous! Every time he got in the car all he wanted to do was drive the crap out of it. When I started working with him, I could never imagine him being a father. Now seeing him with two kids is a phenomenal transformation. He is fantastic dad. I think all drivers, everyone learns, go through life and grow; experience teaches a lot. If you look at Kimi, the PR stuff he does now and what the sponsors say, everyone is super happy with him, and he’s got a global following of fans.

He doesn’t give much away in public; is he a shy character?

I think that mysterious side to him is intriguing for people. I don’t think he is particularly shy – the whole fan side of things,he obviously understands Formula 1, knows he is a popular driver, but it is not something he deliberately tries to play to, he just tries to get on with the job and what comes with it comes with it. One area he is very good is with kids. There was a guy who come up to me in Spa once, with this charity, to say this girl has cancer and she’d just love a picture with him or to say ‘hi’, and he spent 25 minutes sitting down and talking to her.

Is he quite a difficult character to work with? He polarises opinion – some people get him and say he is brilliant,others say he is completely closed off, difficult to work with…

The nicest thing I’d say about Kimi is what you see is what you get. Zero bullshit, zero politics. Kimi’s always been his own character and will always make his own decisions. He’s got a very strong head on those shoulders, so if he doesn’t want to do something, it is really difficult to get him to do it.

It sounds like he is not too demanding, quite independent and knows his own mind.

That is quite an accurate description of what he is like. I think he is probably the opposite to what most people think. If I was to describe Kimi, it would be ‘Mr 110%’. Goes into the gym and goes 110%. If he is lying on his sofa, he’ll go 110% horizontal! When he drives anything, it would be 110%, if he goes out it is 110%. I think that is just the way he lives his life.

The public persona is the ‘Iceman’: cool, disinterested, closed-off. Is he really like that?

In most situations, he is like that, but Kimi is actually a very warm, big-hearted character, and he has got a phenomenal sense of humour, but that is not really something people see. He needs to like people as well. If he doesn’t particularly like being with someone, he doesn’t do anything other than just ignore them.There is no bullshit, if he doesn’t like someone, he is quite straight about it. I think I’ve seen all the different versions of him, but I wouldn’t carry on working with him if I thought he was an arse. I actually really like him. I think he is super genuine, superkind. That is something people don’t really see so much.

[ask-jackie-chan]

This is probably going to be the last Jackie Chan Adventures High School AU in a sequence like this. After that, if any ideas come up I’ll just post it. 

Behold, Jackie Chan Adventures Part VI!

J-Team Members at the end of the school year:

Jun ‘Charlie’ Zhou, 9th grade, 14 years

Rocko Elio Baranello, 9th grade, 14 years

Yu ‘Jade’ Chan, 10th grade, 15 years

Paco Fernando Tejedor, 10th grade, 15 years

Frank Maghnus, 11th grade, 16 years

Jackie Chan, 12th grade, 17 years

Esther ‘Viper’ Levi, 12th grade, 18 years old

Tohru Yamamoto, 12th grade, 19 years

Eduardo ‘El Toro’ Diego Tejedor, 12th grade, 19 years

Zi ‘Drago’ Long Huo, 12th grade, 19 years

When Drago gets home, he wants to ignore what Jackie had told him but found that he couldn’t. No matter how much Drago would refuse to listen to Jackie’s advice, he found that Jackie was right, and if he didn’t change soon it would be too late to fix anything. When Drago comes back to school on Monday, he finds that it’s easier to say something than to actually get it done.

It takes Drago the rest of the school year to bend his back backwards and every which way to get the approval of Jackie, then later the J-Team. It was everything from public school humiliation, extra work given by the Principal and Vice Principal and pretty much being treated like a servant by each member of the J-Team. It’s gotten to certain points where Drago really wanted to go back to being the mean asshat he was before, but someone was always there watching him to make sure he’s doing the right thing.

Viper, Jackie and Jade were the last people to fully trust Drago mostly bitter Viper and Jade. They desperately wanted to put Viper’s pet snake in Drago’s bag, but Jackie had to restrain the girls from doing so.

For a while, Drago’s friendship journey made his other “friends”, the Ice Crew, angry but Drago had learned to ignore them over time. They hadn’t really done Drago any favors to begin with.

Drago loves bad puns and cheesy, annoying jokes. Of course it’s irritates everyone, but that was one of Drago’s pieces of childhood that made him happy, so the bad habit stuck to him.

There’s a thing at 13 High that most students and faculty refer to as an ‘Incident’, or ‘The Day... ’.‘The Chicken Noodle Soup Incident’, ‘The Day Jackie Beat Drago’, ‘The Viper Incident’, ‘The Day of the Museum Field Trip’, ‘The Senior Prank Incident’. A lot goes on at this school, so the easiest way to remember them all is by properly labeling them so people don’t get confused.

Now the Field Trip one I want to explain. The J-Team and their World History/Geography class go to the San Francisco Natural History Museum for a whole day. The class is a pretty big class, so Mr. Kasahara organizes everyone into buddy systems to take notes on what they see. Jackie + Drago, Charlie + Frank, Paco + Viper, El Toro + Jade, Tohru + Rocko. According to Mr. Origami, if anyone causes any sort of trouble, they will be held responsible.

Drago is “too cool” for Jackie, so he goes off on his own. Jackie has to go find him and ends up deep into the museum for him to find his way back. When Drago finds the opportunity, he locks Jackie in the janitor’s closet and runs away to do his work. Luckily for Jade + Rocko, they learned how to get through the museum as they were looking for the bathroom. It took around 10 minutes to get Jackie from the janitor’s closet, which costed the three of them 10 points from their assignment.thanks a fuckin lot Drago

Jackie has a very good memory and is very observant. On the first couple of days in school, he was able to remember all of everyone names he’s encountered. It helps him with his studies and of course, helping people in the school when they have trouble with memory.

Jackie’s had more than one encounter of waking up on a Saturday for school. This lead to a couple of Jade’s pranks to which Jackie disliked.

All the teacher work days, extra holidays, Spring Break and Winter Break confuse Jackie, as he didn’t have too many of them in China.

Jackie’s hair goes down a little bit past his shoulders. He takes very good care of his hair, which is probably why everyone has their hands in it constantly. Not that it bothers Jackie, since Uncle used to have to tie his nephew’s hair up a lot. Sometimes, if Jackie gets lazy, Jade offers to do Jackie’s hair in the morning, which results to many interesting hairstyles.

Jackie was okay with school lunch at the beginning of the year until he ended up getting sick from eating a not-so-well-cooked chicken sandwich. This resulted in Jackie having to stay home for a week with a bad case of the stomach virus. After that incident, Jackie takes food to school and if there’s a case where he has to eat school food, he’s very cautious of it. to be fair Jade and Frank warned him and he chose not to listen

Over the school year, Jade takes many, many pictures of Jackie and the J-Team. At first, Jackie is a little uncomfortable and slightly bothered by the constant clicking of the camera, but then he begins to not mind.

The reason why Jade is doing so is to take all the pictures and turn them into a slideshow to show Jackie and the school, since the school can’t seem to get enough of Jackie. At first, Principal Black and V.P Hartman aren’t okay with Jade constantly having her phone out but after she told them her plan, they were fine with it also.

The weekend before graduation, 13 High’s tradition is to do a Senior Picnic day, where all the seniors can choose not to come to school and hang out in the park for a day of fun. El Toro, Tohru, Viper and Jackie show up, but Drago decides not to show. The J-Team seniors are a little concerned for Drago and they all call him, but his phone doesn’t answer.

Graduation is coming up, and Jackie is a little bummed because he wants Uncle to see it. Sadly, he doesn’t have enough money to buy Uncle a plane ticket as he had used it for other generous things. He would ask his uncle and aunt, but he doesn’t want to bother them with something that wouldn’t matter. But Jade knows her cousin enough to see that he wishes his uncle was here, so she asks her parents instead and they are delighted to. The money is sent to Uncle and when he finds that the nephew he’s raised is going to graduate, he gets his best formal clothes and quickly arrives to the U.S. ASAP.

On graduation day, Jackie, Jade, her parents and the J-Team are of course very emotional. The only people who know about Jackie’s surprise are Jade and her parents, as the rest of the J-Team know nothing. When Jackie’s name is called for his diploma, he looks out into the crowd and sees his friends, family and Uncle? There on stage he freezes up, unable to move. It had been so long since Jackie was away from his uncle that happy tears fall from his face as he runs down from the stage to give his uncle the biggest embrace he could.

Jackie’s reunite with Uncle is pretty happy, which makes a lot of people cry. V.P. Hartman is wiping her eyes, Capt. Black is blowing his nose, Aunt Mei and Uncle Shen are trying hard to keep their tears suppressed. Drago himself has a tear, claiming it’s just ‘sweat going into his eyes’. 

When Drago’s name is called up on stage, he notices a familiar shadow into the large crowd of people. After the graduation is over, he goes by himself to find that shadow to see that it’s his Uncle Seymour. Whether Drago likes to admit it or not, he’s actually quite close to his Uncle Seymour.

“Unc? What’re you doing here?”

“I was let out for good behavior. As for your dad... euh, it’s weird. He said he wants to talk to you. He’s at your house waiting for you,” Seymour explains.

“Why would I want to see that deadbeat?”

“He said it’s urgent.”

Seymour drives Drago home as fast as he can and there Mr. Huo is, playing with Henri. He tells Drago to sit down and begins to actually talk to him. Even though Mr. Huo is speaking in a somewhat harsh tone, this would be one of the first civil conversations Drago would have with his father in who-remembers-how-long. what they talk about is something i’m not even sure of

The day after graduation Jackie is packing up his bags in his room, ready to go back to China. Aunt Mei and Uncle Chen catch him. Jackie prepares to formally say goodbye to them, but they aren’t dressed to go anywhere. Aunt Mei tells Jackie that Capt. Black had called and said that he got a full ride scholarship to the San Francisco State University told you jackie’s smart. Jackie is skeptical about this because he’ll feel guilty about not being able to take care of Uncle.

“Oh nephew! What’s the point of taking care of Uncle in China if Uncle’s coming to America?” - Aunt Mei

[torentialtribute]

Cazorla’s return: Back in Spain squad after 668 days out and a skin graft tattoo on his ankle

Santi Cazorla plays again for Spain in one of the most incredible comebacks of the

Santi Cazorla is on the eve of one of the most remarkable comebacks of football

The experienced midfielder thought his career was over after a series of injuries Cazorla made a final and emotional return to Villarreal

] Pete Jenson for MailOnline

|

Santi Cazorla is the man they thought would never play competitive football again. On Friday evening he is back in the Spain team and it is not for some nice delayed testimony for services to La Roja – he is there because he may just be the solution for the team that will be next season & # 39; s euro goes in

When Cazorla did a series of interviews at the start of the season – including one with Sportsmail – the questions focused mainly on whether I was afraid of being kicked and if I thought I would survive the season.

Arsenal at the end of last season.

At that time, he had not yet confirmed his future short term by Villarreal, the club from which he took it. Many people believed that Santi Cazorla (center) would never play again, for club or country "

<img id =" i-2ca21042dec478a2 "src =" https: // i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/06/07/12/14497234-0-image-a-19_1559908508965.jpg "height =" 446 "width =" 634 "alt =" Many people believed that Santi Cazorla ( middle) would never play again, for club or country "<img id =" i-2ca21042dec478a2 "src =" https://dailym.ai/2IuNhlh image-a-19_1559908508965.jpg "height =" 446 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-2ca21042dec478a2" src = "https://dailym.ai/2WgE5KP /07/12/14497234-0-image-a-19_1559908508965.jpg "height =" 446 "width =" 634 "alt ="

A couple of decent shows in a friend of friends They convinced them to give him a two-year deal, but the hard work had only just begun .

He had to convince coach Javi Calleja that he was not returning to become an impact or someone who could play for an hour when the sun was out – that he was someone to build the team.

Things didn't start well Calleja didn't seem to know what to do with Cazorla and Villarreal slipped into a relegation battle. When the manager was fired by the owner and replaced by Luis Garcia Plaza, it seemed that the writing was very on the wall.

Such was the extent of his repeated injuries, Cazorla had to have a skin transplant of his arm. the extent of his repeated injuries, Cazorla had to have a skin transplant of his arm "

So was the extent of his repeated injuries, Cazorla had to have a skin transplant of his arm

<img id = "i-1323d80d6f66a3ea" src = "https://dailym.ai/2I5dQP7" height = "423" width = "634" alt = "Now Cazorla is smiling again and back in the Spanish international team at the age of 34" class = "blkBorder img-share"

Now Cazorla is smiling back and forth in the Spanish international team at the age of 34 smiles again and back in the Spanish international team at the age of 34

The new coach wanted Villarreal to be faster, stronger and more powerful.

In a bizarre twist on the strange season of Villarreal – they reached the semifinals of the Eu ropa League, but only secure security with three weeks of the season to spare – they fired Garcia Plaza after 50 days

It wasn't that he had done badly, but it was rather a case of Fernando Roig, the owner of the club, who arranged eleven others about his son and told him: I am still the boss. He not only removed Garcia Plaza, but he restored Calleja.

After looking at the team for a month, it seemed that Calleja had changed some of his ideas. Cazorla had to be more important than ever. Vicente Iborra was purchased from Leicester and would give Santi support in midfield

The two laymen on the same wavelength from the start and Iborra & # 39; s physical presence helped free up space and time for Cazorla to play.

There were still tears when I missed a penalty in a relegation clasp, but the famous smile returned to his face. He had expressed his fears earlier in the season that he sincerely believed that the team was relegating. But now, what could be a nightmare, ending in the second layer ends to end in style.

<img id = "i-68ba19d61db0613a" src = "https://dailym.ai/2IoSXwX image-a-33_1559911681615.jpg "height =" 447 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-68ba19d61db0613a" src = "https://dailym.ai/2WgE5KP /07/13/14498690-0-image-a-33_1559911681615.jpg "height =" 447 "width =" 634 "alt =" Upon his return to the League, the capable star managed to stay fit and make a real impact. for La Liga, the skilled star managed to stay fit and have a real impact "

On his return to La Liga, the skilled star managed to stay fit and have a real impact

<img id = "i-b41fd57fbe1535ac" src = "https://dailym.ai/2I183cY a-35_1559911891045.jpg "height =" 509 "width =" 634 "alt =" Cazorla became a club legend at Arsenal but his career was ravaged rd by serious injuries "

Cazorla became a club legend at Arsenal but his career was plagued by serious injuries" career was plagued by serious injuries

Villarreal found its wings exactly on time and the Cazorla's midfield magic was an important reason for the turnaround. He has not been relegated.

Tonight's away match against the Faroe Islands may not be the most glamorous of the four-year win, but he doesn't care. And he could also face Sweden on Monday at the Bernabeu

& # 39; There were times when I thought I was throwing in the towel & # 39 ;, he said in the closing season of his injury that caused him kept out for 668

& # 39; But the next day I was always trained hard with the hope that I could play again. & # 39;

He still bears the scars – some of the most famous scars in soccer with a part of an arm tattoo that are now covered just because of a skin transplant. But he still has a chance to shine for Spain with the euro of next season for the possible possibility if I share the club form for the country in the next two games.

Share or comment on this article:

Source link

[yahoo-from-the-marbles-blog]

Fernando Alonso's Indy 500 ends 21 laps early because of an engine failure

Fernando Alonso’s car came to a stop inside turn 1. (Getty)

The unreliability of Honda engines driven by Fernando Alonso in 2017 carried over to the Indianapolis 500.

The two-time Formula 1 champion proved why he’s one of the best drivers in the world during Sunday’s 500. He ran at the front of the field most of the day, passed cars in the draft with ease and led 27 laps. But his race ended with 21 laps to go because his Honda engine expired on the frontstretch.

“I came here basically to prove myself, to challenge myself,” Alonso said. “I know that I can be as quick as anyone in an F1 car. I didn’t know if I can be as quick as anyone in an IndyCar.

“It was nice to have this competitive feeling, even leading the Indy 500. One lap you put on the lead there, it was already a nice feeling. I was passing, watching the tower, saw the 29 on top of it. I was thinking at that moment if [McLaren CEO Zak Brown] or someone from the team was taking a picture, because I want that picture at home.”

Alonso started fifth and immediately fell back at the start of the race. But he started picking cars off one by one and worked his way to the lead on lap 37. He stayed at the front of the field most of the race.

But then the ominous signs for the Honda engine powering him started appearing. Teammate Ryan Hunter-Reay was forced to retire when his engine quit. Same for Honda-powered Charlie Kimball.

Alonso was able to enter the 2017 Indianapolis 500 because of how awful his McLaren Honda has been in Formula 1. He failed to finish the first three races of the season because of mechanical problems and didn’t even get to start the Russian Grand Prix after his car stopped working even before the race began.

Had Alonso been a contender for the Formula 1 title, he likely doesn’t skip the Monaco Grand Prix to try to win the Indy 500. But without a point to his name at the start of the season — a feat that wasn’t unexpected given Honda’s woes in 2016 — it was a no-brainer to head to Indy and try to win the fabled race.

He was fully capable of doing so. Alonso took to the track quickly through practice and qualifying. So quickly, that F1 champion Lewis Hamilton threw some shade towards IndyCar to L’Equipe. Via USA Today:

“I took a look at the qualifying results,” Hamilton chuckled, according to L’Equipe. “Fernando, in his first qualifying, came fifth. Does that say something about (the level) of Indy Car? Great drivers, if they can’t succeed in Formula One, look for titles in other races, but to see him come fifth against drivers who do this all year round is…interesting.”

While no one is arguing that IndyCar is at the same level as F1, the 500 is the first big oval race on the IndyCar calendar. And Alonso got the same practice time — plus rookie orientation — that other drivers got ahead of Sunday’s race.

And with a car that was one of the best in the field, it wasn’t unsurprising that Alonso was a threat. But it was a tad surprising just how well he worked the draft and was able to make passes entering Indianapolis’ treacherous 90-degree corners.

He was set to be a contender for the win … had his car gone the distance. It didn’t. He was seventh when his engine stopped working.

“Obviously when you are eighth, seventh, you know the last 20 laps were intense, but I was taking care a bit of the front tires in the first couple laps of that stint because I knew the race would be decided in the last six or seven laps.

“I think I had a little bit on the pocket before the engine blew up.”

Fernando Alonso gestures to the crowd after getting out of his car. (Getty)

– – – – – – –

Nick Bromberg is the editor of Dr. Saturday and From the Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!

Follow @NickBromberg

[torentialtribute]

Lucas Moura says Champions League semi is biggest game of his career

& I must enjoy this and do my best & # 39 ;: Tottenham forward Lucas Moura could say Champions League semi-final against Ajax is the biggest match of his career

[] There is no translation available for this game. Harry Kane and Son has raised questions about who will take the lead

Lucas says he doesn't care & # 39; who scores for Spurs as long as they are winners By Matthew Smith for Mail Online

Tottenham forward Lucas Moura shows their Champions League semi last last match against Ajax is the biggest match in his career so far.

Lucas was able to lead the line against the Dutch side on Tuesday evening, with Harry Kane and Son Heung-Min both not available.

Despite the size of the game, both for the team and for him personally, Lucas vowed to enjoy the device while Spurs played a European semi-final in 57 years.

<img id = "i-3cba33a54f607fdb" src = "https://dailym.ai/2GLRTmb image-a-57_1556541542288.jpg "height =" 425 "width =" 634 "alt ="

] Spurs forward Lucas Moura says the half Champions League is the biggest game of his career "

Spurs forward Lucas Moura says the Champions League is the biggest game of his career of his career

& # 39 ; It is my first champion & # 39;

They are my first champions Halfway through the competition, it is a great moment for me and I dream of playing in this competition. I have to enjoy this and do my best. "

The absence of Kane and Son has raised questions about who will take charge of Spurs – Fernando Llorente can be deployed as a target, while Vincent Janssen has returned from the cold in cameo appearances.

Lucas, usually an offside player, was sometimes put on the central striker this season – but says he does not consider himself Spurs & # 39; No. 9 in the absence of Kane.

<img id = "i-b51cbcdec80f7766" src = "https://dailym.ai/2V1FODq" height = "439 "width =" 634 "alt ="

<img id = "i-b51cbcdec80f7766" src = "https://dailym.ai/2CYdfvj 2019/04/29/13 / 12859454-6971919-image-a-65_1556542221355.jpg "height =" 439 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-b51cbcdec80f7766" src = "https: // i .dailymail.co.uk / 1s / 2019/04/29/13 / 12859454-6971919-image-a-65_1556542221355.jpg "height =" 439 "width =" 634 " alt = "Lucas has promised to enjoy the game Spurs plays first European semifinal in 57 years" class = "blkBorder img-share" play first European semifinal in 57 years

Asked who the goals van Spurs will score, Lucas said: & I don't care, I just hope we win. The most important thing is that we work together and give the ball to the player in the best position to score. We must play as a family. "

Lucas admitted that the absence of South Korean star Son is a blow, but that his teammates are ready to climb.

He said: & # 39; Son is a very good player, very important to us, of course we will miss him, but we have other players who can do a good job, we have a good team, we are ready to do our best.

& # 39; We cannot count on every player in every game, this is a chance for the other members of the team to show. & # 39;

Share or comment on this article:

Source link