The back tracking after all that righteous indignation was hilarious.
Stylus_XL
joined 1 year ago
If they're just using a bland placeholder name until they find a new title sponsor, they should have just changed it back to Toro Rosso, surely. Reminds me of AM's Racing Point phase.
He didn't phone it in, he never does. He went into this weekend knowing two things:
- the Ferrari was likely to be faster over one lap due to the circuit's mixture of long straights, big braking zones and slow corners suiting their car (see Monza).
- the Red Bull usually has the best pace on race day regardless of its qualifying performance.
Gone are the days where Max has had to regularly risk crashing his car in quali to start as high up the grid as possible - he knows that as long as he has a strong qualifying and a clean start, he can almost always move forward in the race. His banker lap in Q3 was excellent and proved good enough to keep hold of P3 even as other drivers improved.
The only weekend this year where Max has really treated qualifying like life or death was at Monaco where your qualifying position is crucial because overtaking is almost impossible.
Ferrari will be looking forward to this one.
Eh, the difference is that Verstappen showed more than enough moments of genuine brilliance (Brazil 2016 springs to mind) to suggest that Red Bull had a rough diamond worth refining and building a team around. We've never really seen anything from Yuki to suggest that he's worthy of that type of faith or investment. Were it not for his Honda sponsorship I'm doubtful he would still have a seat.
The salt against Max is bizarre to me, but it is what it is. He seems like one of the least political drivers to me because most of his talking is done on track. If he is able to extract the maximum from the car consistently, no matter how tricky the conditions are, at a certain point you have to hold your hands up and respect it.
He's on course to break a couple of records that will withstand cynicism much easier than this one.
Very ironic, I'm sure it was Komatsu that Steiner was chastising when he threatened to "make changes" during one of the earlier DTS episodes.