Welcome back to another edition of Ask Dre, the show where you the fine Motorsport101 audience ask me your questions on F1, MotoGP, Formula E, IndyCar, and the wider world of sports. In this edition, talk on the sudden youth movement in Formula 1, which driver resembles a certain Football club, my style of play with Balatro, and my first year as a Sportscar fan. Hope you enjoy it!
So Red Bull is rumoured to be interested in Franco Colapinto, surely that’s for the RB team with Tsunoda? Also, do you hear Alpine wants him despite having two contracted drivers? Would they sack Doohan? – FormulaBills
Man, F1 got hooked on a new trend faster than Pokemon’s TCG Pocket release. It’s me, I’m hooked.
The trend is hopping back on the youth wagon. Last year we had the first grid in F1 history where the grid was retained over an off-season, and it’s like now we’ve seen Kimi Antonelli, Ollie Bearman, Liam Lawson’s second cameo and now Franco Colapinto’s impressive start to F1 life, everyone’s realised: “Shit, maybe the kids are alright?”
Multiple teams are in for Colapinto, which makes sense given he’s been pretty great to start his time at Williams, immediately impressing people, inspiring large numbers of Argentine fans and putting established star Alex Albon under a bit of pressure for the first time since being there. For Red Bull, the reports from my peers are suggesting that Colapinto isn’t just second RB seat material, he could be coming in straight to the top at Red Bull, which is… bold.
To a degree, I get it. It might be for the best given Colapinto’s early success given he was chucked in at the deep end… to be chucked in at the deep end again. If you look at McLaren, their current lineup of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri has been so good partly because it’s all they’ve ever known in terms of learning to drive an F1 car, despite its reputation as a tricky bugger to drive. It might work here too, even if ironically, it didn’t for his current teammate Alex Albon, who was driving at Red Bull after 12 career starts.
For me, this all feels like a classic F1 driver academy hoarding problem, taking young talent so they can’t be used against you. Red Bull’s umbrella doesn’t need Colapinto in my opinion. If they’re done with Sergio Perez at the end of the season (Which is looking increasingly likely), you can move Liam Lawson or Yuki Tsunoda into the Red Bull seat, and promote Isack Hadjar into the RB for 2025. And it’s not like Hadjar’s been bad, he’s second in F2 right now with four feature race victories. But it feels like Red Bull’s chasing that Crown Rare Charizard in Colapinto because of the body of work he’s already put together because it’s new and exciting.
As for Alpine, the story about being in for Colapinto came out of the Gazzetta in Italy, and sometimes they can jump the gun on sports stories. The talk is Doohan will have a performance clause where the team could cut him loose after five races, a similar situation to when David Malukas was at McLaren’s IndyCar team. It could free up a space for Colapinto to join mid-season in 2025 if he goes without a drive. It would be a dick move to actually activate it depending on how his early results went, but this is Flavio Briatore we’re talking about here, he’s known for putting unnecessary pressure on drivers to succeed. We shall see… *rips open another 10 Pokemon packs*
Which driver is the Tottenham Hotspur of the current grid? – Sian Ellen
So, Tottenham. A team who are generally pretty good, occasionally can pull off a big upset, but are also prone to a good embarrassing moment here and there?
I think Carlos Sainz qualifies for this, right? I like Carlos, he’s a really good driver, but for me, clearly not one of the elite three or four drivers on the grid. And that’s okay, they can’t all be Lewis Hamilton. On a great day, he can come across as “Him”.
Mexico this season was the prime example of that, where he dominated the whole weekend from seemingly out of nowhere. But generally speaking, he’s behind Charles Leclerc over a whole season, and he’s been prone to the odd gaff too – Brazil last week being one where he spun from out of the points after being unable to make progress in the wet or Canada where the same occurred and he spun out, taking Albon with him.
So yeah a driver who’s Top 6 quality but proven to be a bit “Spursy?” Give me the not-so-smooth operator. There’s a reason I’ve often nicknamed him as a Goldilocks kind of driver…
Given Leclerc’s form across most of the season, will Hamilton be in trouble next season? Or do you think Lewis has just checked out of Merc and will bounce back? – Geoff
Do people still not rate Charles Leclerc? I say this because I don’t know so many people are just assuming that Lewis Hamilton’s going to walk in and own the joint from Day 1. Take that back, I know exactly why. *plays Cult of Personality on Alexa*
I get it. Lewis Hamilton has so much stock as the generally perceived GOAT of F1 that he’ll get the benefit of the doubt, and as a result of Mercedes being bad this season, Ferrari will just rejuvenate him. I’m a bit more concerned on the whole. George Russell has generally handled Hamilton extremely well this season.
Russell has smoked Hamilton in Qualifying 20-6 including Sprint Shootouts, 13-7 in races, and has just overtaken Hamilton in the drivers standings despite the near 50-point swing Hamilton had with his two race wins this season at Spa and Silverstone. Now again, I suspect the idea of Hamilton leaving this year and not getting optimum support from Mercedes as a departing driver will be used as a degree of mitigation, but given his clear car struggles and qualifying drop-off… at what point do we say this is a genuine concern?
He’s walking into Ferrari alongside Leclerc, who’s 3rd in the standings and still has an outside chance of finishing as Championship runner-up for the second time in his career. He’s established as one of, if not the best qualifier in F1, a significant Hamilton weakness as he approaches his 40th birthday and a team he’s known for over half a decade, and is more than good enough to dominate and win races when the car allows. This is no pushover for Hamilton and I think it’s a very intriguing matchup to see where he’s at right now. Are his struggles the nature of a Mercedes team still struggling to regain a foothold at the top of the sport, and how much of it might be a genuine decline for a driver who’s starting to look slightly past his very best?
Fernando Alonso has proven you can still be excellent in your forties. Last year’s Aston Martin was his Age 42 season, but not everyone declines at the same rate. In any case, I think a lot of people aren’t acknowledging that this isn’t an easy matchup for Hamilton. At all.
What’s your most played Joker/hand in Balatro? – OtherConor
*fires up game*
Well Conor, this may shock you (It won’t be for any hardcore Balatro player), but the Flush is my most played hand. I’ve played 146 hours of Balatro and played that hand 2,648 times. It’s ironic because if anyone knows my playstyle, I HATE playing the Flush. After all, it only scales up by +2 Mult and +15 Chips for every Planet used on it, so it tends to fall off scoring-wise in later antes.
I’ll do you one better, my Top 10 most used Jokers:
- #10: Blueprint (266 times)
- #9: Gros Michel (272)
- #8: Photograph (285)
- #7: Swashbuckler (328)
- #6: Blue Joker (391)
- #5: Hanging Chad (411)
- #4: Fortune Teller (419)
- #3: Misprint (451)
- #2: Supernova (472)
- #1: Abstract Joker (612)
A little surprised by some of these (Swashbuckler, really?), but most of these are jokers you need to take to get some early-game scoring. Gros Michel being +15 Mult, the infamous PhotoChad Combo (Essentially x8 Mult if you play a Face Card on a scoring hand), and Blue Joker are just good common jokers that score well. Abstract being #1 doesn’t surprise me at all, a condition-less +15 Mult in most circumstances is solid enough to get you into the mid-game with two or three other scoring jokers. Glad Blueprint made it in too, simply put, the best Joker in Balatro. Period.
If you were given the power and authority of being the heads of both the FIA and FIM just for one day, what changes would you make on the officiating in their respective top-flight motorsport series (F1 and MotoGP)? – Narentoro
Easy, more transparency – This is something that MotoGP in particular could be doing so much better on. When the stewards make their decisions, the public hasn’t got a clue on the decision-making process. At least with the FIA in F1, you can go on their website and read any of the press releases they publish over a weekend. Dorna only releases them on an app that isn’t accessible to the public, so we’re relying on a Patterson, an Oxley or an Emmett to share them on social media. It’s how we found out how the stewards concluded that Marco Bezzecchi was at fault when he and Maverick Vinales clashed at Philip Island.
I watched NASCAR at Martinsville this weekend and the “Fail Melon” that Christopher Bell tried essentially eliminated him from the Championship Four. Alongside it was the layers of internal politics as manufacturers went out of their way to support their own, such as Austin Dillion and Ross Chastain backing William Byron and Bubba Wallace doing the same with Bell. I agreed that Bell should have been dinged, he made no honest attempt to come down off the wall. I, however, didn’t agree that drivers weren’t suspended for manipulating the race to favour their driver, a nasty element of the Playoffs that NASCAR has adopted.
Even with all that, I do respect the fact that Elton Sawyer, their VP of officiating, sits down, talks to the media and explains the decision-making process. Even if you disagree, at least we get their honest perspective. We don’t get that in any other major series. The nearest we got to that in two wheels was seeing Freddie Spencer smoking a cigarette outside Yamaha’s hospitality at Silverstone last year!
F1 is part of the way there. On driving decisions, this is largely fine. But on more complicated rulebook decisions, they could be better at bridging the gap between “the book” and “public understanding”. The process is everything. As mentioned in my DRR on Brazil, the nearest F1 gets to that, is Johnny Herbert running to the bookies to explain himself and give his opinions as a pundit. And as said then, at best it’s inappropriate. In some countries, it’s a straight-up crime and something that you shouldn’t be doing as a sports official representing a governing body.
All it leads to is the public and the media getting frustrated because there’s little to no accountability or transparency in the decision-making process and that leads to wankers like me making Podcasts where I vent my spleen at every official I see. Inform the public and I promise you, you won’t take as much shit for it, even if we think you’ve gotten it wrong.
How do you see the Ducati 2025 dream team play out from your perspective? – Deckster
I think eventually, Marc Marquez will win. There’ll be some adaptation time as any new crew chief (And there are murmurs that the #2 garage at Ducati isn’t as strong as Pecco Bagnaia’s), but I think ultimately, when it matters, Marc’s talent will come through.
He’s the only man who’s been able to consistently penetrate the GP24’s at the front of the field via last year’s machinery. There have been issues with crashes and inconsistent qualifying, but the raw speed is very much still there. Three wins was about the ceiling of what I thought he’d be this year, and he achieved that. Given I think the GP24 is about three-tenths a second a lap faster than the 23 on raw speed, I think if you give that to Marc, he’s winning a lot more than three times.
None of this should be taken as disrespect for Pecco Bagnaia. He’s arguably Ducati’s greatest MotoGP rider ever, but I’ve never been able to shake off the fact that in all three years, he’s been an elite MotoGP rider, he’s left opportunities on the table to beat him. He should never have been 91 points back in the first place before he made his 2022 comeback against Fabio Quartararo. Jorge Martin collapsed at the end of 2023, and this year the Spaniard’s comeback is stronger and is now set to dethrone him. And this is with Bagnaia winning 50% of the GPs this year at minimum. He’s great, at his best, completely untouchable. But I don’t think he’s the all-timer alien-level rider some think he is, yet. If he beats Marquez straight up over a season, we’ll talk.
I’ve not followed the Junior series lately. Which of the new rookies do you think has the most potential? – Umasood
It goes to show you how questionable junior talent evaluation is when it’s hard to come to any meaningful conclusion. Kimi Antonelli had a pristine FRECA/F4 record and even with a peaky but not amazing F2 season, Mercedes is adamant on taking its biggest talent gamble since coming back in 2010. On paper, Ollie Bearman looks like the more polished talent, which he probably should be given he won four races in F2 last year, including a rare Double in Baku, with a pair of really good 2024 drives for Ferrari and Haas in Saudi Arabia and Baku respectively.
Jack Doohan was a good F2 driver for the time he was there, he was capable of being a Feature Race winner and fringe title contender, but it never felt like he was the best driver in the series. And we should be going nuts over Gabriel Bortoleto getting the Sauber drive as a potential F3/F2 back-to-back winner but Antonelli and Bearman getting huge F1 chances and taking them with gusto has seemingly taken the wind out of Bortoleto’s sails before he’s even turned a lap in anger.
And arguably, the most impressive of them all right now could be Franco Colapinto who came into Williams while sitting sixth in F2 and allegedly now has teams as high as Red Bull fighting for him. What happened here?! How do we know who’s good when public favour has never been worse with F2, Mechachrome and the road to F1 as a whole?! It’s a mess and I think more of us are guessing than we care to admit.
What’s the most underrated motorsport story of the year in your opinion? – Ciara
Is it just me or have we all kind of forgotten that Liberty Media are about to have a monopoly on Global Motorsport?
Yes, the deal isn’t official yet because the European Competition Commission still has to look at it but Liberty seems adamant that the deal will go through. I’m not so sure myself, we literally had Bernie Ecclestone be forced to sell MotoGP back in the mid-2000s because the CC thought that it would destroy the market to have one entity own both series and I fear that’s where we could be heading.
But for real, I think that bike racing is having a bit of a personality resurgence that I think has massively gone under the radar. I’ve waxed lyrically about Pedro Acosta being a disruptive influence, but also someone genuinely charismatic, and gets that Spain needs another new star when Marquez eventually hangs it up. When he gets to the top, because he will one day, he’s going to be a superstar. Down in Moto3, we’ve got David Alonso as a potentially new super babyface. The most dominant lightweight class Champion ever with 13 wins in 19 races this season, and another star with genuine charisma, and deep empathy and understanding of the greater world given how beautifully he handled his team’s hometown flooding in Valencia. If he can adapt to Moto2 quickly, he’ll be another teenager in the top flight.
In a more obscure series, Toprak Razgatiloglu is finally THE star of World Superbikes, like he probably should have been years ago. 19 wins in WSBK this season, and BMW’s first World Championship, with some fantastic celebrations to boot, the man has become the Vale of his division, and I think he genuinely needs to stay there and build on that legacy, he’s a monster.
All this entering the Liberty Media era of MotoGP, an ownership group that knows how to market stars, could be very exciting. Feels like that has gone massively under the radar.
What have been your personal thoughts on Sportscars as a new fan for this year. What did you enjoy and what would you change? Focusing on IMSA and WEC. – Toki
It’s been… fine. There will always be pros and cons when it comes to Endurance Racing compared to more conventional racing. For me, the pros are, that you can dip in and out, you don’t have to fully concentrate on it, and you can have it as background noise or as a second stream while doing something else, compared to a 40-minute MotoGP race or a 90-minute F1 race where you feel like you have to stay tuned in, even when it can be dull. There’s more time to tell a story within the race, something that I think is key for that human element to be enthralled in Motorsport, that’s always cool too. And let’s be real, Sportscars is in the healthiest place it’s been in decades and it’s wonderful to see so many manufacturers take part in 2024.
Cons? It’ll always be a tough sell to some to sit down for 6, 8, sometimes beyond that for an Endurance Race. That’s a big time commitment even with the idea of breaks and secondary activity. IMSA’s Sprint races are just 160 minutes and that’s a decent middle ground though. Sometimes it is just a bit dull, like any other series. And I will never be the biggest fan of balance of performance, even if I can’t deny, it does work when it comes to producing competitive racing. I will always be a believer that the best car should win, but again, even that has some degree of justification.
There honestly isn’t much I’d change, I’m not knowledgeable enough to have a strong opinion on what I’d improve or change, I’m completely okay as like, a part-time/fringe fan to just take it as it is and go from there. It’ll never be a full priority, but I like it and that’s good enough for me.
That time of year again, Sports Personality of the Year. Dre, your thoughts? – Brother Ryan
Weird vibes on this one. It’s been fantastic that women are finally getting their rightful place amongst the UK sports audience. Last year marked the first time women had won the main award for three years in a row (Emma Radacanu, Beth Mead, Mary Earps), and I strongly suspect it’ll be four by Christmas, more on that shortly. But yeah, the last few years have also been top-heavy ballots where there is one obvious winner and everyone else is playing for second. I mean… Stuart Broad’s retirement tour was runner-up last year, and that was over a drawn Ashes series. Yeesh.
Let’s cut to the chase, Keely Hodgkinson will win. It’s an Olympic year so they always get on the ballot, and she was the only Athletics gold medal the UK won in the Women’s 800m, which is the headline sport for coverage in the country. The only shot anyone else would have would have been if Lando Norris had won the Formula One World Championship and Brazil had ended those hopes. Her being 1 to 4 odds with the Bookies says it all.
If I had to guess the other 5 people on the shortlist, I’d say Luke Littler will make it in after his Premier League Darts Championship and making the World Championship final as a shock unknown 17-year-old at the end of last year (I’d have given him a genuine chance if it wasn’t for the fact his headline event was in January). Lando Norris will make the shortlist as F1 Championship runner-up, Sir Mark Cavendish for breaking Eddy Merckx’s stage record at the Tour De France in his retirement year, Dame Sarah Storey for pushing her Paralympic Gold Medal Count to an astonishing 19(!!), and I think it’ll be either Sir Ben Ainslie for taking Britain to their first America’s Cup Final for 60 years, or Tom Pidcock for his second Cross-Country cycling gold. Probably Ben because it’ll be awkward having two cyclists on a six-person shortlist.
And because World Sports Star is growing in significance, I think it’ll be Leon Marchand for his incredible Olympic swimming run (Including two golds in one night), even if I think it should be Tadej Pogacar for his cycling Triple Crown.
Thank you to everyone for the questions, see you in December for the post-season edition of Ask Dre!
