Silly Season is steaming ahead…
Well we know Piastri’s going to McLaren, all bar the official announcement, and the probability is Schumacher will go to Alpine. Given Honda’s involvement at A-T, I’d have thought Tsunoda will be confirmed for one more season. I’d LOVE someone to have the courage to give Jamie Chadwick a drive, but the sport is too ossified to take risks like that, sadly. I’ll confess I’ve not kept abreast of feeder series, so hard to speculate who else might get snaffled-up - I’m guessing Craig will have some ideas…
Venues are disappointing - all the dodgy ‘sportswashing’ suspects stay - including China likely back, while it looks like France is gone, and Spa likely to go as well. Miami is likely to stick and Las Vegas may (will?) join, and there’s even talk of Kyalami returning…
Hmmm…
This.
…but aging man, he say “no”.
I’d guess she’s likely at the very-least simulator tested with at least one F1 outfit well before now, and perhaps not been deemed competitive?
Or just can’t attract the right funding… Which would be infuriating.
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You would think that a smaller lighter driver would be an advantage to teams where every kilo is a tenth (Or however the calc works)
And the marketing potential of a female driver.
I sense there’s the whiff of Susie Stoddart about Chadwick. A few tenths off in the simulator is enough to sideline somebody who could develop.
Another dominant year could see her there by default, he hopes wistfully.
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The frustration with this is not really about her absolute numbers, nor the money she might bring, it’s the people at the top just not seeing the bigger picture at-all.
They don’t see the harm they do to the sport forever chasing dirty money, and they don’t see golden opportunities like this one to really make the sport relevant - even at a time when big progress is being made with women in sports…
For the F1 dinosaurs, it’s eternally 11.59pm on the last day of the Cretaceous . . .
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Just noticed I omitted the link from #4… Derp.
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Mick Schumacher to be Mercedes reserve driver:-
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I made the mistake of not checking the 2022 thread for a couple of weeks so missed out on the exchange of team principals so will add some comments here.
Sauber have in my view done the best out of this in getting Seidl. There was a big roar of approval when this was announced at Sauber.
Ferrari have done the worst with Fred. Let alone the fact that Mattia had met all his targets and was developing a team towards winning, starting again with a new approach and having little understanding of the Ferrari politics will make Fred’s job even more difficult. Mattia needed to sort out his strategy team as they have over the past 5 years cost the team a lot of points. He also needed to sort out putting a Technical Director in place as he left himself with too much to do.
I am still amazed that Ferrari got rid of their best Team Principal / Technical Director for a long time.
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Spot on Ian.
As ever the Italian press are too ignorant but influential and nobody in the top Ferrari management have any idea of how long it takes to build a winning team and getting them all working effectively together.
Drivers never do either - their timeline is nice and short, make a small mistake which loses time and the opportunity to do it better occurs about 1 ½ minutes later, not 12 months.
I never managed to come up with a plan that even could result in success in less than 5 years, Mattia got 4…
Andreas was a development engineer on the BMW F1 engine and I worked closely with him when I was at Williams. He was comfortably the best and most competitive of the BMW engineers.
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His 3rd place in Adelaide 1985 in a 3 wheeled Ligier is something I’ll never forget.
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Red Bulls Christmas card. (Seriously - it is their own work.)
Great to see they have a sense of humour. 
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You should ban yourself for that 
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And YOU threaten US with the Banhammer?! 
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You should ask for other offences to be taken into consideration and be happy with any sentence that doesn’t require a bloke wearing a hood and carrying an axe.
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