I remain unconvinced that F1 people understand sports. F1 is a sport. I would not dispute that. But it feels like its people stumbled into the sporting world. They did not choose to be here, and they don’t know what to do.
McLaren has taken a lot of heat for yesterday’s mess in Hungary, which is a funny thing to write after a team finishes 1–2 and significantly closes the gap in the constructor standings. Should they have taken the heat? Honestly, I don’t think this was a McLaren issue. I don’t even think it was an F1 issue, or at least the setup wasn’t.
What happened at the Hungaroring was a conflict between F1 as an individual sport and F1 as a team sport. If F1 was an individual sport, McLaren’s decision-making criteria would have been clear in the first place: Prioritize Oscar Piastri, who earned better treatment by getting himself into first place. If F1 was a team sport, McLaren’s criteria would have also been clear: Proceed with the uber-cautious pit strategy, but then let Norris run away with the race, because it doesn’t matter who’s first and who’s second.
This problem is kind of cool. The tension between individual and team isn’t a bad thing, and it exists on a unique level in F1, where the constructor championship doesn’t have an equivalent in NASCAR or IndyCar and the teams are only two drivers wide. Where it became a problem is that once the issue flared up, competitiveness stopped.
The issue got dressed up as one of competitiveness. Norris was excused for wanting to win, and for wanting to chase points in the individual standings. But Norris wasn’t being competitive in an honorable sense. A legitimately intense competitor would have said, “Fine, here’s the spot, Oscar,” and then raced him back the rest of the day. What happened was not competitiveness causing conflict. What happened was F1 devolving into an exercise in protecting the feelings of the vain. Neither driver really deserved the win. Norris didn’t earn his first place position, and Piastri didn’t have the speed to keep up with him late in the race. McLaren was gifting a driver a win either way. That’s not competition.
Anyway, funny that Norris has such an easier time letting Max Verstappen through than his own teammate. Especially with his newfound points obsession. *BIG OL’ EYE ROLL*
More from F1:
- Verstappen’s relationship with Red Bull is getting hilarious. Him driving straight into Lewis Hamilton was hilarious. The appearance that Gianpiero Lambiase called him childish was hilarious. Revelations that he’d been gaming ‘til 3 AM the night before the race were hilarious. Max Verstappen belongs in the NBA. He would be such a dedicated flopper, and we would all hate him so much from his time at Duke.
- Sergio Pérez’s relationship with Red Bull was already hilarious, but it continues to reach new levels of tragicomedy. The headline that he doesn’t want his kids to think he’s a quitter was taken out of context (he was saying he didn’t want them to learn to quit), but what a funny headline. “Checo, you are unable to keep the car on the track. Why?” “I’m no quitter!” I think I said something similar in college once when I went back to the Hamm’s after a barf.
- If Red Bull does replace Pérez and doesn’t replace Pérez with Daniel Ricciardo, I wonder if that could drive Ricciardo to NASCAR. I hope it does. He’d be fun to have around. Although Ricciardo finding himself involved in goofy Verstappen situations would also be funny. Win/win, I guess.
- After F1 changed its rules to allow Kimi Antonelli to take over Hamilton’s seat next year, Kimi Antonelli said he’s not sure he’s ready to take over Hamilton’s seat next year, citing how he still has so much to learn in F2. This is funny because F1 changed its rules to allow Kimi Antonelli to take over Hamilton’s seat next year.
- The FIA is going to test a cockpit cooling system to make it easier to race on the playgrounds of oppressive regimes. Those tend to be in hot places. This is why heat is sometimes described as “oppressive.”
The Brickyard Is Back
The Brickyard never leaves, but it did kind of leave NASCAR, and aside from Ryan Blaney, I think everyone had fun with its return this weekend. Wacky luck for Blaney; great luck for Kyle Larson; luck is always part of the equation in NASCAR.
With the return of the fourth stock car major coinciding with a golf major, the weekend does bring back the question of how NASCAR can make its marquee events—the Daytona 500, Southern 500, Coke 600, Brickyard 400, and the old Winston 500 at Talladega—a bigger deal than its championship. It’s not that you want to get rid of the playoffs, because they do serve their purpose. It’s that you want those to sit secondary to these huge races, and you want these huge races to get the same treatment as majors in golf and tennis. More golf than tennis, really, because of the randomness. It’s sad for Denny Hamlin to have never won a Brickyard 400, but it doesn’t reflect poorly on him as a driver the way it might reflect poorly on Iga Świątek that she keeps struggling at Wimbledon.
Branding would go a long way for this, but I’m guessing NASCAR’s afraid of devaluing its non-majors by labeling its majors as majors. In lieu of that, then, I think I simply need to become a Wikipedia editor and make a “Major Results” section on every NASCAR driver’s page. That’s how we fix this.
More NASCAR:
- Nice day for Bubba Wallace, who was written off as a playoff contender via points but is very much a playoff contender via points. On that topic: We all want Ty Gibbs to fail, right? It is weird how detestable that child comes across. I think part of it is that it feels like Joe Gibbs (whom we love, right?) should be his great-grandpa, not his grandpa. The best way the playoffs can shake out is for Wallace to move in at the expense of Ty Gibbs.
- I love the Kyle Busch/Corey LaJoie feud, of course. What more could you want? It’s easy to get annoyed with LaJoie and Busch is Busch. Also, it seems like one where Busch was in the right? After the Stenhouse incident, it’s nice to see KFB back among the justified.
- The Cole Custer news (back in the Cup Series next year, driving the Haas #41 car) makes me weirdly happy. I think it’s because of this tweet after he won Kentucky a few years ago. I am easy to please.
- Daniel Suárez is going to race in Brazil while down there for…his wedding? I think he’s getting married during the Olympic break. It would have an air of “guy spends his honeymoon golfing” if Suárez wasn’t marrying Nelson Piquet’s daughter. In light of that, it feels a little like a reverse dowry. Now, Daniel will be performing a tribute to the Piquet family by driving a racecar here in their country.
IndyCar Avoided Killing Anyone
The biggest thing for IndyCar every racing weekend is that all the drivers and fans and race personnel survive. Every week (or sometimes month—the Olympic break is fine, but the overall schedule is nuts), this is the first goal. IndyCar is struggling enough as it is. It cannot afford to cause another death.
At both Iowa and Toronto, IndyCar achieved this. Unnecessarily airborne vehicles? Sure. Especially unnecessary at Toronto. But nobody died. I don’t think anyone even got all that hurt!
Congratulations to Colton Herta on the win. I was beginning to forget about Colton Herta. Remember when F1 wouldn’t let him race because he was too American?
Note: A previous version of this post misattributed the Verstappen childish comment to Christian Horner.
