“Him.”
Hi folks, welcome to another Dre’s Race Review, and this time, it’s time to finish the F1 season with its final Triple Header. Round 22 of the Championship was in Las Vegas and with it, George Russell dominated the proceedings as Mercedes took a 1-2, and Max Verstappen brought home his fourth World Championship. Let’s get into it.
We’ve Tried Nothing And We’re All Out Of Ideas
In a similar vibe to last year, Vegas was a challenging weekend for the sport, mostly down to the sheer lack of grip on the track, combined with frosty temperatures, dipping as low as 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Which by F1 standards might as well be the Arctic Circle.
Call forth Mercedes, who would go on to dominate the weekend as a direct result. For those who haven’t kept up, Mercedes has been in development hell since 2021 when you combine a simulator that wasn’t calibrated right, a technical directive that saved their drivers from their spines being broken due to porpoising of the car, had implemented a zero sidepod concept that led to a technical reshuffle and now their latest issue – A car that is extremely reactive to temperature. In hotter weather, they’ve been overheating their tyres and losing performance. As a plus point though, it’s made them very fast in colder weather, and on tracks that lack grip. Guess what Vegas is?
Mercedes topped every session of the weekend, including George Russell taking his fourth pole position of the season ahead of Carlos Sainz and… Pierre Gasly? More on him later. George dominated the race, always looking like he was in complete control and once he survived the initial DRS attack of Sainz, Russell took off. He had a nine-second lead by the end of the first pit window and didn’t look back.
Further behind, Lewis had another poor qualifying session, starting from 10th, but mounted a great comeback to finish second, scything through the McLaren’s, Ferrari’s and Verstappen’s Red Bull. Took Russell’s gap down to about half what it was too. Don’t know how much Russell was keeping back to hold Hamilton off, but it never looked like Hamilton had a serious chance. With it, Mercedes took the 1-2 finish they should have had, and it marks the first time in the sport’s history that four different teams have had a 1-2 finish in a season.
It might be George Russell’s best weekend in F1, and a nice reminder that this is a quality driver having a quietly great season. Paraphrasing NASCAR: “Russell wins, and this time, he gets to keep it!”
Super M4x
Slightly further behind, Max Verstappen came home in fifth place just behind the two Ferraris, and given McLaren where nowhere in race trim, all Max had to do was finish ahead of Lando Norris and it was enough for him to take his fourth consecutive Championship.
There’ll be a lot more words said on this when I get to writing my season review around Christmas time, but for a range of reasons I’ve come out even more in aw of Max than I did before.
Looking at my tenure as an F1 fan, there was a whiff of 2009 about Max’s excellence this year. At the start, when Red Bull’s RB20 opened as the best car, Max did what he’s so brilliant at, running the field over with overwhelming raw speed. Winning five out of the first seven was huge in building up that lead. But once the field closed in around Miami, it took Max grinding out every result he could get to keep the field at bay.
That first wave, with beating Norris in Imola and Spain, the second place at Silverstone, the win in Canada when Mercedes and McLaren were all over him, those were critical days as the tide of the battle began to turn. Verstappen went 10 rounds without a win between Spain and Brazil, his longest dry spell since 2020, and even during that run he had an Average Finish of 4, including two Sprint Wins. That’s still easily Championship-level form unless someone’s winning everything, and Max took advantage of a very fluid title picture, where Mercedes hit a purple patch around the summer break, and Ferrari took a pair of victories themselves. As everyone else, tripped over each other Max was the only constant. The Brawn GP of the modern age.
Yes, Max crossed that unsavoury line of racecraft multiple times, in Austria and Mexico in particular he went way over the line of fair combat and flirted with outright gamesmanship. But when you know your other main rival Norris was inexperienced in those fights, you can take those risks, and for the most part, they worked. You may not like it, but it’s that grey area ripe for exploitation that made many an F1 great what they were.
And of course, that Brazilian GP. As great a drive as you’ll ever see to go from 17th on the grid to winning by 20 seconds, surviving nearly undrivable conditions and cashing in the opportunity given to end the title fight just as it was getting interesting.
It’s one thing to keep your concentration and bring the car home when you know you don’t have to be perfect to win, like in 2022 and 2023, two of the greatest single seasons ever seen in terms of pure achievement. This year was different though. Max didn’t have all the answers. He didn’t have the best car for three-quarters of the season. He had to deal with his bosses’ horrendous sexual harassment investigation that shook the team to its core and the murmurs of a power split. The departure of the talismanic Adrian Newey, and further departures to come like Jonathan Wheatley.
The operational excellence wasn’t what it was last year, with a pit crew not firing on all the right notes, and the strategy not quite as slick. The largest chasing pack Red Bull have faced in 15 years. The FIA breathing down his neck over swearing. Max won this Championship with two races and a sprint to spare. That is outrageous.
For me, it’s the greatest of his four Championships. He’s a four-time Champion, just the fourth man to ever win four straight, alongside 62 wins and 40 pole positions and he’s still only 27 years old. We are witnessing one of the greatest of all-time at the peak of his powers. It’s truly astonishing to me.
Welcome to Max Mad: Fury Road.
Andretti and the Petty Olympics
This is another one of those stories where you just roll your eyes in frustration over just how stupid we’ve all been about it in the world that is F1.
So, in case you missed it, according to the Associated Press (Hi Jenna), F1 could be set to approve an 11th team into F1 as early as next week, and yes, it’s the Andretti bid, but not as we know it. Kind of.
So it turns out that Dan Towriss, the new CEO and leader of the day-to-day at Andretti (formerly of Gainbridge), has been able to sit down with Formula One Management. It may be coincidental, but this is within the same week that Greg Maffei announced he was stepping down as CEO of Liberty Media, F1’s commercial owners.
Now, it’s worth noting here that according to everyone who matters in the media space, there isn’t too much that’s changing about the Andretti bid that’s led to this change of heart. General Motors is likely going to have more of its name on the front, likely through its Cadillac sub-brand alongside its power units in 2028. But Andretti is still going to be the nuts and bolts of the operation beyond that. They’ve already built their two facilities in Silverstone and Indianapolis and have their chassis in the works via their time using Toyota’s windtunnel in Cologne.
As far as I can tell, the only real reason everything has changed is because Michael Andretti has stepped down from the day-to-day running of Andretti, and it seems he was the figure creating the impasse. More proof of this is Dan Towriss is the only name on Andretti’s IndyCar charters when the series has a requirement that states you have to legally name any owner on the team who owns less than 10%. So despite Michael claiming he never sold the team… yeah.
Michael’s approach to getting into F1 has certainly been bullish from Day 1. He rocked up in the middle of the Miami GP last year waving around petitions and trying to convince teams that he was going to add value to the grid. This didn’t go down well with a lot of the other team bosses, and F1 CEO Stefano Domenicalli openly criticising their approach. It likely didn’t help when Michael’s father Mario took an invite to sit in front of Congress to claim their bid was being blocked by the sport. The Department of Justice promptly opened an investigation as a result. All this while most of the team owners have been dismissive of a move, such as Toto Wolff’s excuses about track facilities, or James Vowles’ impassioned speech on Sky last year about Williams and its 900 mouths to feed.
The team bosses, acting like a cartel, allegedly told General Motors to buddy up with someone else. Even Mohammed Ben Sulayem, the FIA President who green-lit the bid changed his stance and encouraged Andretti to buy a team instead.
The fact that the U-Turn from Formula One Management was this swift, to the point where they might be approved before the season ends says this was just a petty ploy to make sure Michael wasn’t in the picture anymore. Because little else besides that makes sense as to why everyone’s suddenly now cool with this. Even the team bosses have softened their stance, with the obvious: “Well, if they add value, we’re all for it!”
It makes the last year feel like an outstanding waste of time. What this says to me was, that this was never about the money pot and the fear it was being divided by 11 instead of 10. It was never about the fear of increased competition, or raising the anti-dilution fee to compensate for it. Andretti offered what the teams and the sport wanted – Factory backing, from an American market they’re desperate to crack and from one of the biggest car manufacturers on earth, and they were prepared to still say no unless Andretti himself stepped back. This shit is pettier than Richard.
All this over something that objectively has everyone winning. The fans get more competition and drivers to care about. The teams get more value for their slice of the pie, even if it’s a little smaller to begin with, and they’ll have extra cash in their pockets to compensate for that too. The sport gets a truly American team that wants to lean on that heritage (unlike Haas), as F1 pushes as hard as it has for the last half-decade to try and gain a foothold against NASCAR’s market share. There was never really a drawback to all of this, and THIS was why it was on the brink of collapse.
Please, please don’t like my dumb sport. Go watch IMSA instead or something.
The Lightning Round
It takes a lot for Charles Leclerc to lose his rag given the amount of nonsense he’s had to deal with in his time at Ferrari, but this was a set of messages during the race that had Leclerc raging at Carlos Sainz’s refusal to play the team game. Post-race, he said: “Yeah, I did my job, but being nice fucks me over all the fucking time, all the fucking time. It’s not even being nice, it’s just being respectful. I know I need to shut up, but at one point it’s always the same, so…”. Yes, when you sack a driver in January, you can’t be surprised if he’s not willing to play along, but Leclerc’s fighting for second in the driver’s title and was the faster driver in the backstretch. It’s poor form from Sainz and Fred Vasseur needs to stop massaging the egos of their drivers and do something about it. Your first World Championship in 16 years is staring you in the face.
PS: I need to go to Spain and figure out how Carlos Sainz is SO GOOD at conning fans into giving them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to questioning how good they are. Sainz drops a couple of radio messages on strategy to a team that’s had a horrible reputation in that department for years and people are now acting like he’s this must-keep genius. He’s not. Charles Leclerc has been Ferrari’s ceiling for five years now, not Carlos, and certainly not late-career Sebastian Vettel. The narratives have been there gassing up Sainz for over a year now with revenge arcs and false dawns and he’s 60 points behind Leclerc. It’s massively unserious.
One more on Sainz, if you’re curious as to why his pit lane crossing wasn’t penalised on his second stop, it was because there was no race director-specific instruction saying that was a no-no. Normally, there’s no punishment or rule on commitment to pit entry, even if you change your mind either way. I think that’s nonsense and needs to be addressed in future.
At what point does the Franco Colapinto bubble burst? That crash in Qualifying was the fifth Williams have had in their last three weekends, and Colapinto’s had three of them. This is the downside that was always going to bite eventually when you put an inexperienced rookie with just half a year of F2 in the deep end of an unfamiliar calendar. I get that James Vowles wants to maximise the value of potentially selling the rights to his prospect, with multiple teams sniffing like it’s a football market. But if he’s not careful, Colapinto just may end up as a deadweight reserve next year when Sainz arrives.
Gutted for Pierre Gasly. Qualified a brilliant P3 for Alpine, only for his power unit to detonate early on. Brutal, and another critical swing in the battle for sixth in the Constructors, with Haas back on top. (Haas – 50, Alpine – 49, RB – 46) Alpine can’t afford to let chances go begging like this with just two races left. Didn’t help that the team straight-up goosed Ocon’s pitstop by not being ready for him.
Sergio Perez is cheeks. At this point, how could Yuki Tsunoda possibly be worse for next year? It seems to be that Red Bull is just committed to running a one-car team and has no interest in balance whatsoever because this is untenable.
If you genuinely believe Lando Norris that even with a perfect season, Max Verstappen is winning the title, I think you’re on a large amount of copium. I’m glad both he and Zak Brown have been so gracious in conceding the driver’s title, but you don’t get to spin this back around and pretend that you never had a chance. If you truly believed that, you wouldn’t have used team orders in Hungary, danced around Papaya Rules down the stretch as Oscar Piastri sent it in Monza, and you wouldn’t have hardened your stance on it in Brazil. That’s not the actions of a team who felt like they had no chance of winning.
Speaking of Zak… Murder. Death. Kill.
— not scuderiafemboy (@hugeballsracing) November 24, 2024
PS: Now we know Danica is a full-blown raging Trumpian, wonder how she felt holding a Sky Sports microphone with the rainbow colouring on it…
Dre’s Race Rating: 6/10 (Decent) – While it wasn’t quite the banger of 2023, I’m glad F1 didn’t try too hard to glam the shit out of Vegas the second time around, and this was a perfectly solid race. Yes, the passes were mostly done via tyre offsets, but it was still reasonably entertaining. I do wonder if Vegas would be better in either Miami or Austin’s slot, because November/December may be too cold to fully utilise what I think is a good track and good layout for racing. Alas. See you in Qatar.
