When Alonso retires, I’m sure Daddy Stroll would LOVE to replace him with Max. There was that rumor a bit ago that Stroll offered Max $1 billion to come to Aston.
But Max might be tired of F1 at that point and may go do something else.
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wtf. Max do it.
Lawrence should consider offering another bil to Alonso to preemptively retire
I don’t think more money would make Max’s life any different. He just wants to play on his sim and hang out.
And I don’t think money would make Alonso retire either. He has been racing F1 for 24 years, he doesn’t need money.
Yeah but it’s crazy money. Thats 40M pretax annual income in tbills at current yields.
At that point it’s not about needing it. It’s just a stupid amount of money to throw around for a driver lol.
Is coaching included?
Toto must be out of his mind to get rid of Antonelli. What that kid is doing.. Australia he had damaged floor in Q, matching Georges pace during the wet race. China he raced with damaged floor.
I want to see what he’s doing mid-season.
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First video I’ve seen that actually offers onboard video analysis of what Liam is doing wrong instead of just clickbait parroting what Albon said about the car being fronty.
I think red bull hurt Liam for hanging onto Daniel for so long too. I think horner and marko knew Daniel didn’t have it anymore but still kept him on last year, only to swap out near the end of the season. Liam could have used that extra seat time in any car.
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The question I have rolling around in my brain. Doesn’t this issue with the driver show up on the RB sim? If the sim is supposed to be as accurate as they claim, the #2 driver should show not being able to compete long before getting on track. Confusing to me.
Or is that one of the reasons overall RB performance is suffering? The sim is lacking. 
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Well I was wrong. Liam out, Yuki in.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DHslLSuStuX/?igsh=djduNW00b2Rpd2t1
There’s no risk of death on a sim, so I imagine that’s the difference. If the car must be driven by just grabbing the scruff of its neck and hanging on, that could be easier done on a sim than IRL. Lawson has seemed to be very shaken up by these first races, so he’s pretty rattled. Horner’s statement was essentially along the lines of giving Lawson a less stressful car would help his longterm development.
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Sims probably aren’t that good. Also Max is an exceptional sim driver, so it’s so difficult to compare drivers in that context.
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That’s a good point. Like Albon noted, you can build up to the car a bit but it’s very sensitive so once you get to the knife-edge you risk having an off or crashing. In the sim, you can play with that knife-edge more because there is no consequence. In real-life, if you have an off or crash the car, there are massive consequences, so I imagine what the RB number two drivers are dealing with is having to drive the car at 90% because any more than that becomes super difficult. And of course with an F1 car (or a kart actually) if you don’t drive it on the limit it doesn’t work as it’s supposed to.
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Outta curiousity, why not have the #2 car set up differently? Because they’d pull the car in if max’s car fails and they need it for him as a backup?
The car is designed to work a certain way. You can set it up differently but it will be slower, though maybe easier to drive.
It would be like saying “if you can’t drive the kart with it hiking the inside rear wheel, maybe try and set it up differently”. You can’t really, the kart is designed to hike the rear wheel. Trying to force it to do something else will make it slower.
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As referenced somewhere else in this thread there is precedence of all-time-great drivers/riders leading the development of their machinery down this road. For instance it’s been widely panned that Marc Marquez did this very thing at Honda, and before him Casey Stoner was the only one that could get the Ducati to perform at all in his era. It makes sense - you get a GOAT driver/rider who can ride the wheels off anything, and then they’re given full priority in development by the team because a) their success, as well as b) wanting to keep them happy, and well, unless those drivers/riders happen to be top-flight test/development riders (it’s own whole specialty), eventually the team ends up with the only thing they can under the circumstances - something built around a single person, which may or may not relate to properties that are considered generally and widely driveable.
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Except even Max has been unhappy with the car last year and this year. Red Bull is simply not on the game. Too much internal turmoil and too many key people lost to other opportunities. They will continue to slide for a bit. They may recover, or they may go the way of many other former great teams in Motorsport.
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Exactly. The only difference is Max can drive around the problems, because he’s a once-in-a-generation talent. Lawson is clearly very good, but there is a difference between very good and a virtuoso.
They always say the best drivers can wring every ounce of performance out of even a bad car and get it up the grid higher than it deserves. If a driver is even leaving 1% of the car’s potential on the table, that is 0.9 of a second on a 1:30 lap. We are talking fractional differences separating the best from the just good.
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Max has had more or less full control over the development of that car for years, and this is where it’s at (which goes directly to my point about the difference between “Great Drivers” and “Great Test/Development Drivers”). He has to bear some responsibility for the outcome, unless we’re just willing to say that Red Bull’s engineers are stupid and incapable.
And to keep the comparison going - Marquez eventually found the Honda (he developed) so unrideable that he left for Ducati, sacrificing large amounts of money to do so.
There’s a bit of confirmation bias with the Marquez/Honda thing. Yamaha have fallen off a cliff too and who is to blame for that?
This isn’t accurate in the slightest. Max is on record saying he car was going array in 2023 during his dominant season and he stated how important it was to keep the team together. he has been quite vocal the second seat too and really it’s a car issue not a driver one. He isn’t designing parts. There’s no ‘Verstappen Friendly Vortex’ structures.
Newey left a team he basically had effectively built. Let’s not forget that
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I wouldn’t exactly call Quartararo a GOAT, and Yamaha haven’t been dominant since Lorenzo was at the height of his powers, so I don’t see the comparison.
This isn’t accurate in the slightest. Max is on record saying he car was going array in 2023 during his dominant season and he stated how important it was to keep the team together. he has been quite vocal the second seat too and really it’s a car issue not a driver one. He isn’t designing parts. There’s no ‘Verstappen Friendly Vortex’ structures.
Since we’re not there, I guess we’ll never really know whether it’s a matter of crap in crap out in terms of driver feedback, incapable engineers, or a combo of both, but I can tell which side you are predisposed to. 
(personally, I lean toward “combo”)
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