#sorry if I undersold Danny at Renault

[eh-33]

I’m bored, so I’m going to talk about my ‘unpopular’ f1 opinions.

These might not actually be unpopular, but I feel like they could potentially annoy some people.

I don’t like George Russell - there, I said it.

And the sad thing is, it’s not even for any proper reason. I just don’t like him, probably the same as how some people just don’t like Max.

He irritates me, I don’t enjoy watching his interviews and I generally don’t care about how he performs - if he does incredible, I can appreciate his talent, but I wouldn’t go off about it.

In my mind it’s probably because he feels like such an opposite person to Max - he feels very media trained, always seems to be very calm, says what his team would always want him to say and really projects himself in a specific way to appease certain people or his team (ahem… after Abu Dhabi and merc). He also completely contradicted himself with his Spa take and his Abu Dhabi take which pissed me off.

Whereas Max who is my favourite driver is rash, blunt and sometimes doesn’t say the exact right thing or what the team would want, and can rub people the wrong way, and is just purely himself at all times, no mask, no filter, just him

So because of this I’m definitely not looking forward to George in a merc, however I do think there hopefully will be an adjustment period when he underperforms compared to the car - or the merc just isn’t on pace with the new regs🤞🤞, because I don’t think I can handle seeing him be immediately fast, I wouldn’t enjoy it. But I doubt it, because as much as I’ve only properly seen it on like 3 occasions (spa, Sakhir and Sochi) he can be lightning fast, and he does outperform that Williams, and a Max/George fight may be good to see, as long as Max wins 😂😂

Secondly - I quite like Christian Horner.

I feel like Christian is very protective of his team and especially his drivers. But then every team principal is.

But he always is talked about as a ‘Karen’ which I don’t feel is entirely fair. I think he goes about racing in a cutthroat way - and sadly it backfired on Gasly - but he will always try and somehow protect his drivers until they begin to badmouth him or the team.

He can go too far, he can be a bit whiny, but so can every team principal on the grid, we just don’t hear it as much.

And finally my most controversial take - Daniel Ricciardo screwed up leaving RedBull and after that with his next teams - and hasn’t been able to recover.

Now this is the take that has quite a lot of thought going into it - and I’m not saying he shouldn’t have left, he had reasons and they are valid if they were impacting him that much that he thought leaving would help him. However I don’t think leaving actually helped Daniel in many ways.

Now the reasons Daniel supposedly left RedBull are

because he felt he was becoming a no.2 driver to Max.

because he didn’t trust Honda (big mistake 😂)

because he wanted a new challenge and to ‘lead’ a team.

Now I loved Daniel at RedBull and I still love him as a driver now. But I think moving to Renault was a bad move especially after Renaults 2018 engine - if that wasn’t a sign I don’t know what would be. At RedBull he was known as a could-be world champion and was up there in terms of driver rankings with Lewis and Seb and now 2 teams later he’s known for having a freak win at Monza and being generally disappointing every other race - when he ‘should’ have come in and absolutely led that team and beat Lando - not what I thought would happen anyway, but lots of people did think that.

But here’s the other thing - Daniel was not going to beat Max, even in 2017, Max was clearly getting faster - he just kept making mistakes or DNFs - and by 2018 Max was better than Daniel. The only thing that I think brought them together was Renaults shit reliability. I genuinely don’t think Daniel could have handled Max being clearly better than him in the same car in 2019, because by the end of 2018 Max had taken a turn in his career and sort of got himself sorted, and Daniel main claim to fame a lot of the time was in quali and Max has sorted that issue, so I believe Daniel would have left anyway - because he would have been consistently out performed, except from a select few occasions.

Renault just didn’t do it for Daniel and I think even he knows that, but now at McLaren he has put himself back into the same situation as he was at RedBull - his teammate, a young driver getting faster every season - not as impressively as Max did but still, the point stands - and a supposed future world champion with the right car, then there is Daniel, not getting faster, struggling with the car in some way, getting a few good results to show his worth but overall not getting faster or dominating in the way that is maybe expected.

It’s disappointing when you think about how good Max and Daniel could have been, especially with the Honda engine and the RedBull of this year. But it’s also interesting that Daniel has had problems with each car he’s driven since he left RedBull, and every RedBull ‘second driver’ hasn’t been able to fully manage the car since Daniel left. No one would come close to Max, especially after this year, but I think that RedBull was set up very well for Daniel and he’s struggled since. I can’t say what he should have done, as I don’t think Max and Daniel would have had a good relationship if they stayed teammates, they always raced each other too hard, but I don’t think the years after he left have been good for him, and I think he left RedBull thinking he would be getting better every year and getting podiums and winning, but instead it’s raised further questions about his ability to adapt and perform.

Thanks for reading my ‘Eve rants about f1 post’, if I’ve offended you with my takes, don’t be a dick about it, leave a respectful comment or an ask and I’ll expand on what I mean about anything I’ve said.

If this absolutely slaps, I’ll make more, cause I enjoy talking about f1 and I have many many opinions that would probably piss other people off.