the-aqueerium - Tumblr blog

the-aqueerium · 27 minutes ago

Text

Something that has gone largely unnoticed by the wider community is how absolutely lethal of a combination haas with nico and kevin specifically is. don't get me wrong, haas has been on an amazing upwards trajectory, and ayao has been transforming the team. but that does not mean there are no issues. they have huge holes specifically in strategy and tyre wear that, thankfully, nico and kevin have been able to patch over.

we know that nico is amazing at tyre management and overdriving his cars. we see it every saturday in qualifying, really. but he's what I have filed away as a nervous driver in my head. he qualifies well and then bottles his starts. he runs in p3 and makes stupid, stupid mistakes. he gives up battles too quickly.

kevin on the other hand is really good at defending and overtaking. he doesn't have the most overtakes on the entire grid for the 2024 season for no reason. he didn't pull off jeddah for nothing. and he may not be able to get miracles out of the haas as nico can, but he does still drive it to the max.

nico has pointed out that the difference between them isn't as big as it's sometimes made out to be. that doesn't mean there isn't a difference. I do believe if you are looking for the raw race pace of the car you should look more at kev than nico, because nico feeds his cars crack and snorts a line of cocaine before getting in. he isn't the benchmark we should look at for '25, kevin is. the team is doing well, but there is still work to be done in 2025.

now, you can probably already see where this is going. being shit on the tyres is fine if you have a guy who could drive his tyres to the moon and back. of course, being good on the tyres would mean you could fight for higher positions and even podiums, but the below average performance from the team gets made up by the above average performance from nico to come out at, well, averages. p8's and p9's and so on.

and you can get away with fucking your driver over in strategy if he is just going to keep going, elbows out, and make his spots back up. if kevin will relentlessly continue fighting and driving like it's a win.

kevin is also a very late braker. his driving style looks, still, despite the years, very imprinted from his FR3/FR3.5 days (which as you may know was the series he competed in before making the jump to F1), where he is fast and late in the corners. this means he needs a stable and heavy rear to balance him and not send him flying into the person he is overtaking or the wall. what would cause understeer for others is a good set up for kevin.

here we get back to nico. nico is crazy adaptable. he's a bit older than kevin, and you can also see that in his driving. he went from GP2 to F1. the cars of the 2000s/late 2000s are a lot more aggressive than nowadays--which is why we saw a lot of the older drivers start to fall off around the 2018 mark. not all of them could adapt to this change. smoothness is the name of the game.

if you watch nico's race on boards, you'll find this smoothness, because he needs it to not wear his tyres. but for qualifying, and being quick over one lap pace, you want as much tyre grip as possible, and for that he reverts back to a more aggressive driving style. this isn't the norm. it took the rest of the pack that started around the time nico did or earlier time to adjust to the new car driving style because you don't just snap your fingers and switch that up. or, you know, you aren't supposed to.

apart from that, you will also find that nico tends to brake late, though not as much as kevin. it still means they do well with similar setups.

however, what this lead to, is that nico came into the team in 2023 to a car that was primarily set up after kevin. and they could just keep going with that, because nico can make all of his cars work. he can snap his fingers and feel around a bit and then he's back to his usual strengths and weaknesses. this is one of the parts that tends to go unnoticed, because realistically he doesn't have that many strengths beyond tyres and pace. we dont see this adaptability as the average viewer. beyond both of them being late brakers and carrying lots of speed in the corners, they can iron out the kinks for kevin. it's also a constellation he is used to, with checo also needing this rear in a heavy set up (and max doesn't, which is part of the reason we started seeing such gaps in their performance when the car started being shit. it was, at least, still set up for max, but not for checo).

we already know that their driving styles work together well; that nico is open to experimentation with setups; that kevin does well with the haas car because he has been their driver for six years. he has been with haas for six out of their eight years. they quite literally built this team and their cars around him. they need someone like nico who can deal with that, who doesn't need them to change up everything as they have done their entire time in the sport for him. it makes it comfortable for haas, because they are a small team, and they have budget issues. the more they can focus on upgrades and strategy, the better. they don't need to waste time on figuring out what works, because they know what kevin needs and can trust that nico will manage with it.

that's the car. at the end here I already started getting into it from a team dynamics perspective. kevin is incredibly loyal to them, and we know the team is to him (not talking about gunther, or even ayao/management. talking in the race engineers and mechanics sense). kevin brought them their first and only pole. haas stayed with him when everyone else seemed to have given up on him. we joked over it on this side of tumblr when it happened again in baku, but historically, haas does not do well without kevin. the team seems to basically fall apart. of course we can't know the specifics, how deep this actually runs, how much feedback he actually gives and how much of it is just coincidence and being used to him, so on and so forth. and it's not like this is impossible to fix, with time and effort. but it is something that is real.

there's also strategy. haas is shit at it, there's no better way of putting it. canada's brilliant wet tyre gamble and how badly they fumbled it. how often kevin is running well and then gets demoted to somewhere p13-p18 because someone on the wall fumbled it. but this is okay, because kevin and nico are both incredibly aware of the entire field. they are not as reliant on the team outside of when to pit. listening to their on boards is a steady drip of information, and I do mean both of them. they know the times of the three people behind and three in front, tyres of said people, how well they are doing on said tyres, who is boxing and when, where they are coming out, who they are going to be a threat to. all the stuff about covering someone with a pit stop, or not overworking the tyres now so that you can overtake x person later, kevin and nico do themselves. I know more about the rest of the field listening to haas onboard than to the broadcast. compare that to oscar's radio--which I put up in baku when kevin wasnt racing--there was dead silence. crickets. kevin and nico are incredibly aware of the rest of the field at all times. it is rare that it is ever silent on the radio for long.

haas is an incredibly fragile team, and they need this consistency and austerity to put in performances like we have been seeing over the past season.

but what does this mean for the future? well, it's not completely bleak. esteban seems to also prefer an understeer heavy style of driving, but I will admit to not being as familiar with him. either way, he shouldn't be completely out of familiar waters getting into a car that has been developed and set up around this style. and oliver seems adaptable enough, jumping from F2 to ferrari to haas and at least not dying in the process. he is also in a relearning period regardless of what team he is in, because he is moving up to F1 for the first time proper. he'll be able to learn things the haas way immediately.

the real kickers are going to be if haas will manage to iron out these issues that kevin and nico have been accounting for. yes, they should ideally improve upon their race pace some more, so that they can comfortably and consistency achieve those p10-p8 positions. but they need to figure out how to make their car sustainable on the tyres, and for god's sake fix their strategy.

that is the biggest issue I see at the moment, in strategy. I do not see rookie oliver bearman being able to cope with the overload of information haas is unloading on kevin and nico because it makes things easier for them. I have never listened to esteban's onboard, I don't know what that is like. even if all three of them, esteban and bearman and haas manage to adjust to each other (realistically we'll end somewhere in the middle, haas doing more of the heavy lifting themselves, but bearman and esteban still having to pick up the slack), this will take time. it won't be tomorrow. I don't even know if it will happen within the first half of the season, or the first season altogether.

I think there is a lot of potential in haas as they currently are. I see them doing well with esteban, kind of their new kevin. guy who has been slowly but surely excluded from the rest of the grid (not talking from a drivers POV, talking teams and media) and rubber stamped as aggressive and dangerous. haas has a history of taking on guys who no one else wants anymore. esteban and ayao have history. I can see them going for long, and doing well.

(I personally do not see bearman staying there for long; either making it and moving on to ferrari or breaking and earning himself the same fate as mick schumacher. haas is not a place for rookies in my opinion--and maybe with all the things I mentioned earlier you can tell why--but that isn't the point here.)

and for kevin and nico? well, kevin is leaving. nico is still adjustable, and no matter how shit sauber will be I think we can continue to expect him to outdrive his car. the only question is if that will be enough to put the car into the points or not.

nico didn't ask kevin to come to audi with him for nothing. it's something fun and light hearted to think about initially, but think on it deeper; when has this ever happened? a driver asking for his teammate to follow him? advocating for it with his team principal? I cannot think of it happening before. kevin makes things easy for nico. he works his way through the problems with the car, lets haas fix them; and nico can do the rest himself, the tiny bits that are adjusted to kevin and not to nico. they also get on well off-track, and I do think we have seen them learn from each other. nico seems less nervous, more open to overtaking. that maturity he gained from kevin isn't going to stop him from being a big baby on the radio; but we see it on track. similarly, we have seen kevin put in some amazing tyre management, and his qualifying pace seems to have also improved.

it is an absolutely coked up combination haas managed to have for these past two seasons. and I am grateful it got me (back) into the sport, and that I got to see it.

87 notes · View notes