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March 26 - March 31, 2024
Instead of being a suave European, he was a squinting Englishman who complained so loudly and so often that Wolff had compared him to a yapping terrier.
toto wolff u are so real for this
it’s important to understand that this whole enterprise can be boiled down to one central question: Which team best understands aerodynamics?
Undoing the misguided approach for the W13, which also influenced the 2023 car, would take nearly two seasons and the best part of $700 million. It’s no exaggeration to call it one of the most expensive mistakes in the history of professional sports.
That all of it could come down to such a fine detail—one errant grain of sand on a beach—illustrates what distinguishes Formula 1 from every other major sport. This is a competition where the most decisive action of the season can take place not on the track in the middle of a Grand Prix, but in a wind tunnel simulation that no one sees, somewhere in the British countryside, months before the season begins.
After all, when risk-taking is in your DNA, you are always on the precipice of greatness, right up until you slam into the wall. The entire sport is about understanding the rules, finding the gaps, and driving through them with your foot to the floor.
F1 is as much a technology problem to be solved as it is a competition to be won.
The drivers may be the ones who get doused in champagne and invited to the Met Gala, but the real game-changers are the nerds who spend their entire careers studying the rulebook and hunting for loopholes.
The Italians, in a move that would shape sports car aesthetics, movie posters, and automotive fantasies for years to come, were assigned the color red.
From the first season of Formula 1, in 1950, Ferrari made sure that his team would be ever-present in the most prestigious series in the world. It needed to be. And more than seven decades later, Ferrari remains the only team to have participated in every season of the competition.
But forty-two days after the accident, in front of the tifosi at the Scuderia’s home race in Monza, Lauda was back at the wheel of his Ferrari 312T for a Grand Prix.
“Formula 1 is Ferrari and Ferrari is Formula 1,” Ecclestone says. “It’s that simple.”
Siempre
Whether supporters cheered for the red cars or against them, the Ferraris were part of the furniture. The Scuderia’s very presence was enough to set F1 apart from any of the other major motor racing series.
Despite the existence of that one prototype, there is no such thing as a Ferrari IndyCar. A Ferrari NASCAR is basically an oxymoron.
Everyone wanted to see the Prancing Horse taking checkered flags. But once it became the only thing they saw, they realized they were no longer watching races at all. Attendance fell by as much as 50 percent at some venues, TV ratings slumped, and sponsors began to question their commitments. One British newspaper suggested the Cavallino logo should be replaced by a python, since Ferrari was slowly squeezing the life out of Formula 1. “For five years, we won every race,” Brawn said. “It was predictable.”
It's giving RBR 2024
“The biggest problem with America is they believe they are the greatest power in the world. Not in reality, but in belief.”
Alonso was facing an even greater threat than Räikkönen—and it was coming from inside his own team. A young British rookie named Lewis Hamilton had finished on the podium in each of his first nine F1 races.
And in 2001, Red Bull established a driver development program to identify young prospects with F1 potential. One of its earliest finds was a twelve-year-old karting gem named Sebastian Vettel.
Less than a year after establishing Red Bull Racing, Mateschitz acquired a second team, the outfit formerly known as Minardi, and renamed it Scuderia Toro Rosso, in part to give the graduates of Red Bull’s driver development program a clear pathway into the sport.
The technical operations director he’d inherited was a passionate Italian from the Alps adjoining Austria, who possessed a strange accent and a virtuosic command of expletives, but wasn’t quite so knowledgeable when it came to aerodynamics. His name was Guenther Steiner.
u don’t fok smash my door
Wolff did find one of his countrymen in his new team. Months before he was appointed executive director and managing partner of what was now called the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team, they had also brought in another investor, Niki Lauda.
Hamilton had it. With a fifth-place finish, he was a world champion for the first time at twenty-three years old and ready to start ripping off title after title. He was blessed with consummate skill, drove an exceptional McLaren, and had now proven that he was the hottest thing F1 had seen since Schumi.
Liberty understood that F1 needed to get over itself.
At this point, they understood that they weren’t making a straight documentary or reportage. It couldn’t be Formula 1 meets 60 Minutes. This was The Real Housewives of Monte Carlo.
If he was being honest, Max would rather be at home in front of his computer playing F1 video games. Which is perhaps why the camera loved the outgoing Ricciardo a little more than the Red Bull driver who actually won races.
Drive to Survive explicitly rejected the notion that finding out who wins was the central purpose of watching sports programming. Repacking stale competition worked because the actual outcome was irrelevant.
Season 2 of the show, now featuring Mercedes and Ferrari, dropped on February 28, 2020. You may remember what happened next.
through Drive to Survive, Formula 1 could sense that it was turning into one of the obsessions of the early pandemic, right up there with sourdough bread and attending work meetings with no pants on.
Then there were those fans who couldn’t care less about tire strategy, or even who finished where. They wanted Toto and Christian spilling tea, Lewis modeling Parisian couture, shots of celebrities on yachts, and Danny Ric kidding around on Insta.
yhapcyfk
The hierarchy of the sport itself barely changed. Mercedes was still way out in front—so much so that its dominance became merely a subplot—the smaller teams were still hopelessly scrapping for a handful of points, and Ferrari was still finding new ways to exasperate its fans.
That miracle came in the shape of a young driver who would soon execute one of the most consequential maneuvers in F1 history. His name wasn’t Lewis or Max. It was Nicholas Latifi, and he wasn’t very good at racing Formula 1 cars.
“Michael, this isn’t right,” he said from the back of the Mercedes garage, his communication broadcast to an audience of tens of millions in real time. “Michael, that is so not right! That is so not right!”
He owed it to the team in the garage, the hundreds of employees back in Brackley, and, most of all, to the shell-shocked driver who had just had history ripped away from him. The whole thing felt like such a betrayal that it wasn’t hard to imagine Hamilton walking away from F1 for good.
Not a day goes by that Toto Wolff doesn’t think about Abu Dhabi.
That was the race that ended the Mercedes dynasty.
“It’s drama and glory, which makes the sport so compelling,” Wolff says. “Everyone saw the drama of a worthy eight-time world champion that was robbed of his title . . . I’d rather have it finished the other way around, but clearly that’s a mark in history.”
“There were three topics you weren’t allowed to talk about at the Christmas table,” he says. “Covid, Trump, and Abu Dhabi ’21.”
Red Bull had come to New York to introduce the RB19, the car that they were all but certain would propel Verstappen to his third consecutive title after following up his triumph in Abu Dhabi with another championship in 2022.
Unlike the Schumacher years, when Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley cooked up solutions to keep viewers and sponsors onside and engineered whatever measures they could to encourage overtaking, F1 under Liberty saw nothing wrong with a juggernaut.
(Despite the perception, only 0.7 percent of the sport’s emissions actually come from the racing—most are generated by the enormous needs for freight transport between Grands Prix.)
Ricciardo returned to Red Bull as its test driver, but also as its social media jester-in-chief, until he was thrust back into a cockpit at Red Bull’s sister team AlphaTauri after its rookie driver proved too incompetent.
oof imagine being so bad you’re not even worth a name drop, rip nyck de vries
By the time he became the youngest driver in Formula 1 history, it was clear that he possessed something the other children he’d raced against in go-karts did not. Verstappen was a killer who lived to race.
His itch to compete was so strong that after winning the 2022 French Grand Prix in Provence, he had only one pressing desire: to catch a short flight back to Monaco, where his idea of a big night in Monte Carlo was locking his apartment door, firing up his three-monitor sim setup, and racing some more against trash-talking teenagers he’d never met.
