op81 (mcl season reflection)
Oct. 16th, 2023 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
goaltenderone last oscar post before starszn begins anew... (← i wrote this as the opening and then did not finish this post in time lol typical. tbf is it ever really starszn until rh24 is leading the zone entry on our fuck ass power play!) i'm truly so tired of everything all the time and idk how much energy i'll have to gif things for a while but i will probably get back into meandering hockeyposting at some point soon enough... 😵💫 can't believe we've started off with an 8-1 oils thrashing + bboeser return to form.
anyway i wanted to write this post because despite having shared endless thoughts re: oscar and/or my unfortunate level of investment in mclaren's continued success, i feel like i haven't written a truly objective overview of his performance this season or factually summarized all of my analyses in one area. i revisit my anticipatory 2k23! post somewhat frequently since it contains thorough-ish amounts of investigation into my belief in mclaren's organizational structure and oscar's potential fit onto the team and i thought it would be worth it to attempt a new retrospective now that 17 race weekends (and one essentially historic developmental jump as far as modern regs go...) have come to pass.
before we get started here's a gif to break up the inevitable visual monotony of what will be 8k words of aimless rambling:
INTRO
revisiting ~expectations~
i think it's always been quite difficult to conceptualize oscar's place as a rookie this season for several reasons, part of why being that when individually considered in a vacuum none of these reasons actually straightforwardly decrease or increase his stock, aka everything HAS to be relatively contextualized. what i mean to say is that:
— spending a year out of racing meant he technically sat on the sidelines developing rust, which accomplished two things: 1) lowered some people's expectations of his performance and offered him, whether substantiated or not, increased leeway to not be as good coming out of the gate, because how you can blame someone for performing poorly when they haven't had to show their racecraft in a real race setting for an entire year?, but also 2) heightened other people's hype for him because of essentially the shroud of intrigue and mystery surrounding his year-long marination as alpine reserve and his opting for their extensive testing program over trying his hand at another racing series and potentially (although unspoken) risking disruption of his triple-championship streak. even with time and space it's better to be able to lean into the image of Untapped PotentialTM and to have achieved maximally in the past than it is to hurt your stock in any way possible in recent memory, then add to that a little bit of media hysterics and you will inevitably stumble upon a breeding ground for fan expectations reflecting the intensity of this attention.
— again important to the second point is that it's not like oscar spent the whole year out doing literally nothing, he was very much actively embedded in the f1 world doing sim work and testing the 2021 car (both different regs and different team/characteristics) and being paraded around the paddock filling in with commentary for sky, which means that it's difficult to quantify both how much this mileage and general acclimatization to an f1-team environment benefited his personal development and hence what level of tolerance should have realistically been extended to him after his gap year. for example if we compare him to his two rookie counterparts at the start of the year, we have 1) dick debris fugazi fe champion with objectively low stock from winning f2 in his 3rd year against a laughably uncompetitive grid (goatifi runner-up), but who came in with inflated fanfare from monza and at least having recent championship experience, and then 2) logan who was forced into williams out of necessity as an academy product, unceremoniously rushed into an uncompetitive car and very clearly in need of another year in f2 before he could handle the jump to f1.
i guess the question is then to what degree did oscar having that year to test the a521 instead of entering another racing category help him developmentally (if it did, although i definitely believe that this was at least the optimal approach for him given the situation), and then how does that and piastrigate and dr's sabbatical inform the way people spoke about him coming into this season?
i'll speak about this more later but mclaren's 2023 season being marked by two clearly delineated halves also obviously adds dimension to his performances and the 20/20 hindsight of last year's contractual risks & decisions. now that we are where we are, it's easy to say that oscar is lucky to be in mclaren thanks to 1) alpine organizational incompetence and 2) seidl and webber's porsche connection, which is also funny to reflect on considering seidl was (in a sense, ambiguously) let go of in the first place and has since come to be seen as semi-responsible for the technical hold-ups of the accelerated development the car experienced this year... regardless it's a take people are much more wont to uphold now that there is quantifiable evidence to support his decisions, even though i already believed last year when i wrote my first post that it was a good move, still believed it to be so during winter testing and after bahrain and throughout the unreliability-tractor half of the year etc., but i guess now it is nice to be awarded even tentative vindication from some dividends being paid.
more on this later but... tl;dr expectations:
[ FAN / PUNDIT EXPECTATION ]
> one of the most insane nico quotes from last year re: oscar joining mclaren was that "it's either he beats lando or he's out" ... well actually people were saying a lot of shit (jense self-reflecting on his palou moment, toto inappropriately projecting oscar's situation onto his own perception of junior teams and the role academy drivers are meant to fulfill because mercedes obviously has the legal department to avoid Incidents Of The Sort) but i think this one is specifically reflective of misguided pundit/fan sentiment that oscar had folded himself into a precarious situation betting on himself by joining mclaren. of course not everyone subscribed to such binary extreme, but the general connotation of oscar thinking himself "too good" for williams/alpine definitely prevailed and defined most of the pressure he faced coming into the season. again this remains an oversimplification in that the williams offer had never been formally presented to him at the time of his mclaren communications and alpine's allegedly binding contracts sat in an elaborate web of presumptive legal falsification, so essentially he never chose mclaren over williams or alpine but over quite literally Nothing, and objectively there is no point debating the hypotheticals of where he should have gone for his rookie season. HOWEVER. that of course is not going to stop the alpine/mclaren fans from scrutinizing the car's full-season potential and their own respective team environments. so it is what it is.
> dick debris.......... what was this bullet point going to be i really just wrote down "dick debris" 12 hours ago like i was ever going to remember my fully formulated thought. i think i was going to say that a good amount of people massively overrated his f2/fe championship experience coming into this season, which is another point toward aka26 discourse of >IT IS POSSIBLE TO CONTEXTUALIZE FEEDER SERIES CHAMPIONSHIPS< even if there are massive nuances to transitioning into f1, f1 and f2's inherent differences (chassis/car design/general development/race length/pit strategy-wise but also environment/pressure/team building-wise, etc. etc. and so on and so forth), but regardless of my rating ndv extremely poorly coming into this season a good chunk of people honestly betted on him to be the best rookie (gurl. in an alphatauri 😭 see autorsport comments from march) which somewhat influenced general anticipation for oscar's debut. i think again it's just like, well speculation is the name of the game in f1 fandom so there were also plenty of people who thought ndv was ass but who would then also obsess over oscar's f3 title fight and argue back and forth about his drs difficulties and logan's quali pace etc., but... I'VE GONE OVER THIS BEFORE WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS.
> alpine fans are contractually obligated to bet on his downfall so that was normal and expected but there were definitely a lot of complex emotions on the mclaren side as well from dr3 fans (hating him for taking dr's seat, finding him dry and boring, wanting him to do poorly to vindicate dr) and to some degree lando fans alike (honestly the biggest one just being doubting the potential of their teammate dynamic lol)... i would say these perceptions were highest amongst the ig/tt girlies but they were definitely out there and extremely widespread!
[ TEAM EXPECTATION ]
> of course at the end of the day this is the only thing that really matters... i think it's really difficult to properly Quantify what a "strong" rookie showing looks like because it's so dependent on various factors, car performance obviously being the core of it but then even things like point totals and percentages are influenced by the relative trend of said performance, because take (for example) even just the gap in points-scoring between the top 3 and bottom 3 — where scoring a certain % of your teammates points does not look the same if you're both constantly finishing p9/p10 vs p2/p3, even though technically the average finishing difference would be the same, and then especially with a car like the mcl60 swinging widely between these extremes it's important to be able to contextualize such discrepancies. BUT ANYWAY. i think the team knew exactly what they wanted out of oscar and with fairly robust confidence what they needed out of him to consider his rookie year a success. i think more than "beating dr last year" by any restrictive set of objectives, there is a holistic rookie package to consider along the axes of: error proneness, adaptability to the car's specific quirks or unpredictability, consistency in quali, race craft, tyre management and subsequent race pace, technical feedback, and then as an extension to that feedback the ability to correctly identify cause-and-effect at the proper junction of on-track performance loss*, aka having a general grasp of where and which weaknesses need to be rectified (because sometimes "car problems" are in fact self-generated; can you understand that you approached a corner suboptimally without needing the data to back it with feedback delay?). again what mclaren (probably) wanted from oscar was → guy who could adapt to the mclaren's tricky characteristics and wouldn't find it at odds with his ""style"" (MORE ON THIS LATER) → rookie who doesn't constantly bin it or put it in the gravel → guy who is generally capable of keeping close to lando on one-lap pace and shows raw promise in race pace even if there are still kinks to iron out that can basically only come with experience. then this goes back to How do you measure "keeping close" relative to dr but... i will try to unravel this more in the h2h section
*eta: just listened to astella btg podcast which corroborated this... "as he does this sort of (slow-speed corner) development journey, what impressed us is his awareness. his awareness of what the opportunities are, even before he looks at an overlay or looks at any telemetry. he kind of has this capacity to self-recognize where there is more to come from either himself or from the car, and this is not so obvious. i know drivers that can be fast, but they kind of definitely need external support as to see what is possible."
public perception / persona / pr
i have a lot of thoughts on how oscar presents himself as a person and how his current character & rookie status influence both his place in the grid & fandom's perception of his performance. i remember when i made this gifset in... may and i tagged it with "#my stonks when people realize he's charming and witty and has normalgirl cringefail swag 📈" which i think kind of summarizes his slow rise (well actually it's been quite rapid when i think back on it LOL i was not expecting people to like him so quickly!!!) to f1 popularity this season. oscar is interesting to me because he literally loves karmawhoring and was obsessed with going viral for his drs tweets back in f3 and basically is very open about his personality or making quips despite his growing reputation for being "cold" and a mentality monster, plus it's also clear from the kinds of dr/ln jokes he laughs at that he has extremely immature humor and is very amused by the Other Lads but mostly just doesn't have any desire to be the one making the joke in the first place ("uh... daniel and i have very different personalities" re: daniel tripping major nutsack quote), so there is this fine balance between being cheeky sarcastic aussie and alleged kimi reincarnate that creates a lot of tolerance for him in people. of course some are less endeared (the pgas girlies who were calling for his mom's head for liking that otmar tweet lol) and i think there's potential for the whole family's social media usage to cool down eventually, but the way people talk about oscar's personality is interesting... the scale essentially extends from → wow he is so boring and dry and has 0 personality i could not care less about him (understandable) to → his mentality is insane this is why he's going to be the next wdc and lando is going to become mclaren's second driver and get forced into early retirement (brah).
i think it is in a sports fan's nature to want to extrapolate conclusive meaning from intangibles (dawg/60) which usually extends into a psychological triangle of 1) how do you anticipate hardship 2) how do you react during hardship and 3) how do you move on from hardship after it's happened — to which point the requisite mentality upheld by fans as "ideal" is highly dependent on the sport itself and its team and/or individual nature. the problem i think for me is when this is seen as factually informative of a person's ceiling above demonstrable measures of their actual performance, and as much as oscar's even-keel personality is something that draws me to him as a fan and is what i've liked about him for a long time i hesitate largely to conflate his alleged "maturity" with the profile of a Potential Champion. also the other day i was like.... i mean natemac has a total hair-trigger personality and got his stanley cup so who even cares. of course that's another simplification but in the end i think the right combination of ego and ruthlessness and team cooperation is obviously enviable but in practice can also be limiting when used to obscure the reality of a driver's actionable strengths & weaknesses. this kind of sounds like i'm calling oscar a pr merchant who knows how to capitalize off the good will of all kimiluvrs out there who call him an inverse-bottas finnish aussie and vote him in for dotd just because he's putting the car in a decent place as a rookie even when his performance lacks the wow factor dotd is technically meant to highlight which is kind of funny because he replaced the biggest pr merchant in the sport coming into mcl so i don't even think it's that bad it's just like.......... well as always there are dimensions to "authenticity" as a celebrity product and we can acknowledgee that. (this is getting too tangential let me get back on track)
don't get me wrong though i do love oscar's radios... see: "oscar i can hear you're pretty excited..." "that's as excited as i get for second place!" i think as much as it's >oscar isn't going to overreact to a sprint top-3 or a quali p2 or whatever because he knows that he's destined for more and truly believes he has what it takes to win, i also like that oscar is capable of recognizing the representative value of each of his accomplishments and beyond just the sentiment of "i can do better than a sprint win" he lowkey thinks celebrating a sprint win is a bit embarrassing and cringe because it's not real LOL. imo his f2 radios were frequently more lively and animated and i wonder how much of that is natural personality growth over 2 years but then also i think if mclaren do manage a full season of being properly competitive and he faces tough racing moments or inopportune contact more often when the points truly "matter" then we will see additional agitation slip through (insert that one quote about if someone takes me out on the last lap for the lead THERE WILL BE WORDS from whatever prema video), and then if he ever gets a proper pole or *knock on wood* wins a real race that will obviously unlock another layer of his personality as well... but we shall see.
ok i have more on his personality but let me get to the actual section that this post was supposed to be about WHY is this intro 3000 words long.
SEASON OVERVIEW
lando interlude
honestly the whole reason i started writing this post was because i kept seeing wank about how oscar is threatening lando's position as #1 driver in the team and a lot of misguided takes re: recent team orders and basically the entirety of qat weekend. for me this goes back to unnecessary psychological extrapolation and recency bias and needing to generalize isolated performance lapses as overwhelmingly representative of a driver's faults. lando... can be hard to talk about because i do genuinely rate him sooo highly and quite objectively consider him an extremely consistent and reliable driver with a proven q3 track record, but he's also been increasingly faulted for cracking under pressure and failing to step up at "critical" moments when opportunities show themselves (which again i do think when we say ~pressure~ that it's important to clarify whether that means as a product of teammate competitiveness or of a desire to maximize car performance since these types of pressure do overlap but aren't necessarily mutually inclusive... i digress): sochi 2021, monza 2021, and now qatar 2023. i guess if anything needs to be the ProblemTM with lando, then you can point back to his admission during the 2019 rookies revisited video of how he wasn't living in the moment in f2 because he was more focused on his f1 seat and george responding in kind that that's why he won the title, which was imparted cheekily but also is a clear reminder of → everything is a process and a progression and getting ahead of yourself is the real killer. maybe there's some merit to lando's anticipatory attitude occasionally getting the best of him, because often i feel like my own hopium walks such a fine line with him where i know he's one of the most clear-eyed and objective guys on the grid in terms of evaluating pace & driveability so when he's finally mildly positive about the car or team it inspires genuine confidence in me, but then when he's Too Confident or carefree the sochi-adjacent ONE (1) FEAR emotions start stirring in me despite my own rationality.
At the same time.............. i don't know. not sure how i really feel about this rhetoric. i don't think that evaluating lando's "mentality" by these specific low points is necessarily nitpicking or anything because they are real and they did happen, and a stinker is a stinker and you can acknowledge that and understand where he's coming from when he calls himself shit with startling frankness, but at the same time his overall consistency and relative "cleanness" weigh much higher in my evaluation of his driving. so it's a delicate balance.
honestly with how i talk about lando now and looking back on oscar's f2 reputation i feel like ...! well obviously mclaren wanted oscar because he's good full-stop and had the results to back it, but when you look at their qualities it kind of seems as though he and lando look very similar on paper and that a lot of what made oscar successful in f2 (great one-lap pace + sheer adaptability + knowing when to take risks) are all things lando is lauded for... one of my favorite astella quotes from earlier on their similar terminology and technical feedback:
this is kind of funny because in newey's book he's like "markseb were the dream engineering pairing because seb had strong mechanical instincts and an obsessive feel for the tyres but couldn't perceive any aero changes so mark complemented all of his technical feedback" and then... honestly i don't even know with dr because from everything i've seen it's like, on the maxiel side max was like "well i liked having daniel around because he complained about the same things i did" but then his biggest weakness was allegedly having very limited technical understanding of f1 cars in general, but conversely he also claimed to be good at giving feedback based off his instinctive feel for the car's driveability which doesn't actually TELL me anything because because that could be So Many Things. i think evaluating "driver feedback" and "technical knowhow" is always somewhat difficult unless it's as with newey or another engineer explicitly detailing what is being offered because even the... ermmm more ~detail-oriented~ drivers aren't necessarily more useful or productive if they can't communicate their point across in a translatable manner or worse if their "suggestions" are misguided self-translations that lead engineers down the wrong path where simply communicating the problem in the same manner as a less technically-savvy driver might have saved them all of that time in the first place. so i never know how much any of this even really matters... or whether it's Good Or Bad Or Just OK that landoscar run so parallel in their technical output.
i think generally fans are often very desperate to determine a clear pecking order within contending teams and that mclaren is no exception, but when you look at red bull's current dominance the reality of it is that the importance of competing against your teammate (especially given mcl's wcc position and oscar's rookie status) is relatively nerfed by the absence of any true championship aspirations. therefore what's interesting about the Best Lineup debates and max gassing 814 up in post-race press and people saying "well right now merc/fer are strongest but mcl have the most potential" is that with merc it's very much....... how to say. imo the ego battle is a lot more pronounced over there even if of course it's not like brocedes level of implosive toxicity and some incidents have also been blown out of proportion, but just the very composition of lewis's position in the team as proven 7x wdc and george escaping williams the year merc stopped being properly competitive have set up a really strange tone for the team, and to that point i do wonder how much our evaluation of how "good" a lineup is includes Team Order Cooperation and ability to work together and to be harmoniously consistent independent of individual driver caliber. in theory i think mclaren's ability to have two drivers who can run close to each other without needing to discern a clear #1/#2 role is a good problem to have, especially if max is max and red bull is red bull and adrian newey is adrian newey................ but.
let's be real oscar is never going to be So Good that he ends lando's whole entire career because no matter what people say lando is better than carlos and better than daniel and has all the makings of a team leader. the million-dollar question really is just, if you have two promising talents who are known for being very clean and consistent (or, one of them is known for it and the other has brought in similar qualities from f2, and then whether these qualities will fully transition over to f1 is still semi-unknown), how will that dynamic adjust itself face with real competitive pressure? of course i do not know ! but always interesting to think about. also i lowkey don't rate george so i do believe mclaren have the best driver lineup rn 😇
anyway season overview. winter testing...... mcl60 design........... bahrain disasterclass. frankly speaking i don't even know where to begin so here's a very rough summative diagram for reference:
i feel like we could delve more into the race-by-race of the first half of the season if we really wanted to but in the end what it comes down to is: the mcl60 was an objectively bad car with a flawed design that missed important developmental targets coming into pre-season testing and of which its pace reflected even more unflatteringly during the first few races thanks to a spat of early reliability issues and mechanical failures. oscar windows xp moment, lando having to pit 6 times in bahrain because of a pressure leak that dramatically limited his stints and only staying out to farm data, having to take a new engine in literally the 2nd race of the season...... It was bad! but being able to look back on how the team navigated that half of the season and the early strides it took to restructure in march prior to these woes is also important.
key (no pun intended) to the technical leadership overhaul was the appointment of andrea stella to the tp role over winter when andreas jumped ship to sauber following vasseur's promotion to ferrari. to be clear i still like andreas, and i think the blame game regarding mclaren's slow development and conceptual flaws and fundamental aerodynamic weaknesses is one that rests entirely on speculation, but i love speculation so i will engage in it anyway:
1. i think andreas seidl did a lot of good in his time at mclaren and i empathetically believe that key had a lot working against him that wasn't always necessarily his fault, and i understand that he has a proven record from his at days and that there is a lot of potential to be found in his continued partnership with seidl now that they've reunited at sauber.
2. however seidl left of his own accord to chase the audi dream whereas key was very much pushed aside once stella was given the reins and the power to reassess the team's existing culture and logistical bottlenecks, which uhhhh... i think says a lot. i'm trying to word this in a semi-diplomatic way so as to clarify that seidl is maybe a bit at fault for making him "his guy" but that there isn't necessarily a Fault to be found in some of key's failures as technical director really, but also that... like. let me try again.
3. the mcl35(m) was mclaren's last competitive car and technically an extension of pat fry's design from the mcl34 era. of course it was still redesigned extensively under key's direction and it's not to say that he wasn't pulling his weight there, but under the new regulations the mcl36 was the first car that was really truly his and his first chance to prove himself as a designer. conundrum here is therefore — where did it all fall apart? the thing with mclaren's development across those years is that you can empathize with the fact that covid hindered their efficiency, with how many resources had gone into developing new facilities and getting the on-site wind tunnel fully operational and the logistical nightmares of needing to securely transport their test model to and from an ancient rented facility out in cologne, so to some degree i think key just didn't have a lot to work with. and sometimes when you reach a specific sequence of bottlenecks in such a manner that you really have no other solution than to just Wait For It........ i can understand how it gets limiting. it stretches resources and personnel thin, disrupts timelines and targets and then contingencies for the timelines and targets and enables suboptimal reactionary decisions that then inevitably reflect poorly on the oversight of the technical director, regardless of how much he was able to control or plan for.
4. but then again that is the job. and maybe the man just didn't understand how to make a car work with ground effect aero. maybe that was his fault, and then instead of finding a way to course correct for the mcl60 the concept remained lackluster and the targets remained unmet and the productiveness of the team and culture within the technical department suffered for it. and i think that stella recognizing... not just that the design direction was flawed but also that key's conservative recourse in introducing upgrades to the car and refusing to push the limits of how much it could be developed, and then not only replacing him with one guy of similar experience but instead attempting a three-pronged leadership approach in order to redistribute responsibility, lighten collaborative burden and introduce better communicative ease amongst branches of the department is reallyyy savvy.
FRANKLY MANY THINGS TO SAY ABOUT ANDREA STELLA I SHOULD WRITE A WHOLE POST JUST ABOUT HIM. i mean disclaimer that i don't know whether any of these changes will actually be GOOD in the long run but i think perhaps key's struggles on the aero side (as well as stella's own personal experience of being on winning teams and seeing how highly successful outfits were run during their glory days) maybe influenced stella to place dedicated personnel in the aero branch so he could then have sanchez directly on car concept come winter (after gardening leave). aka tl;dr i think to some degree key really was just in over his head and that it then snowballed the way dr's issues and incompatibilities snowballed, and if you have a driver who is only capable of incremental amounts of readjustment and who is at odds with your technical vision and you don't have the wind tunnel data or the facilities to really be able to develop the car in a meaningful way to become faster or somehow work around his weaknesses then you can imagine how mclaren was literally stuck in a bind for his entire tenure, not that even this year they would be doing much development to accommodate dr's """style""" (bleh) but you understand what i mean here. hopefully
anyway tl;dr for the third time i'm based and andreastellapilled. i need to write another disclaimer for 2024 at the end of this post but before that we have to move on TO >ACTUAL OSCAR TALK< so here's a small andrea quote about him as an indulgent transition ❤️
a 30-year age gap never hurt anyone 🙈🙉🙊 why is only fernando allowed to fuck the earnest bleeding-heart middle-aged itali.... nvm. okay
OP81 STATS AS OF QATAR GP:
like i said before, the mcl60 was transformed over the course of the season with a three-tiered upgrade schedule, the first package being a holdover from key's work but the final two (hun/gbr and sin) almost fundamentally redesigning every aerodynamic aspect of the car under stella's direction, which considering the massive gains mclaren have made with those upgrades is very promising... even if having any expectations for a reliable season-start as a mclaren fan is naive at this point. i think also just the clear communication of weaknesses over the season on stella's side and creating well-segmented understanding of what needs to be revised in time for specific tracks or for entire parts of the calendar is important for the fans, like silverstone was special in how perfectly timed the upgrades were to coincide with the team/lando's home race on a high-speed circuit even if drag issues persisted afterward (alex albon monza choo choo noise) and the car's performance remained inconsistent, requiring very specific tracks or very specific set-ups and characteristics to shine, like the tricky mixed conditions at spa... lately we've been lucky with tracks that suit us but at the same time carrying momentum and timing upgrades for when they'll be best maximized is part of good structural vision in the first place.
anyway how does oscar fit into this!!! i guess a few things first:
1. OVERALL PICTURE: oscar is having a fantastic rookie season... i don't know if i've said this outright so i'm saying it now. honestly it's easy to want to compare him to other high-caliber rookies (or even the competition he has right now if you want to really inflate his ego...), but if we simply put his performances into a vacuum and revisit the "holistic rookie profile" i mentioned before then everything he's been doing so far really does point him in the right direction. he has the one-lap pace, has mostly stayed out of trouble and hasn't been responsible for an unholy amount of unforced errors or crashes (dutch fp2 aside), and most of all has been steadily praised for his ability to absorb information and improve incrementally from his side of the garage. obviously the team values him and he suits its culture and vision well considering that he's been extended through 2026.
honestly the funniest thing is how much oscar gets compared to literally every driver of mark's era EXCEPT for mark himself (in terms of driving and results). oscarmark are insane because oscar is literally........... ok. how to say. for all that he's an "unassuming" and methodical character, people love to extract narrative references for him from the entirety of the lewis/jense/seb/kimi/nando/etc. group!!! aka lewis is lewis plus testing regs so the eras are purely incomparable but people love to mention him because meh generational mclaren rookies, then with seb because of markseb teammate friction and mark living vicariously through oscar and seeing him as the champion-caliber driver he could never be now that he's years removed from his perception of seb's "immaturity" even if past the frame of young raw potential they are indeed quite different, jense in terms of being prost-like and having smooth inputs and i think maybe to some degree also the tendency to "build up" to pace over a weekend and having self-confidence in not rushing performance and finding gaps during practice instead of approaching every session uniformly, then kimi i guess is also really just a personality comparison but. i almost feel like oscar embodies a very "classic" (???) or steady/assured character that makes people want to compare him to that crop of late 2000s drivers which i frankly see less in other recent rookies??? maybe i just read more oscar wank and this is completely off-base and i'm delusional. REGARDLESS...
2. ADAPTABILITY: honestly i don't want to use the word "lucky" in this post because often we make our own luck and any sense of relief for the season is hypothetical and who knows what could have happened if the car we have now had shown up in bahrain, but i do generally believe that in spite of early season woes oscar was very much placed in a favorable position coming in as a rookie with a gap year and having not just a poorly-performing car but a poorly-performing car with some roughly concrete plan for eventual upgrades that set a benchmark for when he could be expected to better fight for points. so essentially he was given proper time to acclimate without people breathing down his neck for being outperformed by lando, was in a rough spot but not one so bleakly ambiguous that it amounted to "well this is just going to be shit forever because we don't know how to develop the car meaningfully", got his feet wet learning how the team navigated various mech issues and experienced enough disappointment to not inflate his expectations — not that i think this would have been a problem for him anyway but you know adversity is still good generally.
maybe it is lucky that oscar happened to come into mcl in 2023 instead of joining alpine or mclaren last year because he definitely would not have scored 80+ points in either of those cars, but regardless of how strong the mclaren is it's very much a testament to his adaptability that he's been able to step up to the challenge and be roughly in line with lando when given the same package, and the fact that he hasn't gotten completely strolled and Actively Grew with the team's developments is i think what this comes down to and why he's viewed so strongly. even if he does show some glaring weaknesses or lapses of rookie-dependent inexperience and naivety! in the end maybe it is: he's gotten up to speed better than dr3 ever could and that's enough at the end of the day. maybe i wrote this entire post just to circle back to the same conclusion... damn. another astella quote:
3. WEAKNESSES: i could write a lot here but i want to contextualize them in the next bullet point by talking about specific weekends so i'll be brief: oscar's biggest weakness is his race pace. we can talk about how one-lap pace is what reflects a driver's ceiling but at the moment his main woes are a combination of poor tyre management and subsequent lack of pace and ability to maintain position. i guess you can also argue that he lacks the race experience to know when to push certain limits e.g. on starts with the sainz collision, also i find he's had quite a few poor sc restarts so there are other little things to iron out but those aren't as glaringly identifiable......
4. INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCES: i want to rank my personal favorite/most impressive weekends of oscar's because i don't think finishing position or being dotd properly reflects his actual performance every time... also useful to reference this and split-upgrade model in his h2h with lando.
ok let's see... i'll try to be brief. imo qatar is oscar's best showing yet even if not in terms of pure pace, it's such a mindfuck to talk about because of the mandatory pit stops eliminating or i guess i should say transforming the kind of race strategy it required, which in the end benefitted both oscar and mclaren greatly because one of red bull's great strengths is managing long stints — this meant oscar could essentially push flat-out the entire time and "put in 57 quali laps" and (somewhat artificially) close down that 30+ second gap on max in the last few laps with his final pit stop. nevertheless i think this was a great showing from oscar on the side of 1) consistency and not making crucial errors where everyone else did, 2) POINT 3 OF ADVERSITY TRIANGLE: how do you react to hardship (getting his lap time deleted mid-interview and then responding with sprint pole the next day), and then 3) managing the sprint well and not letting the soft running strategy get the best of him, taking the right risks and eventually holding off max for the victory. like yes lando was up on him in his final run for the sprint shootout but consistency and error-proneness are still identifiable qualities of a skilled driver so the fact that he was the one who strung it together for sprint pole (even if not a full reflection of pace) when track limits were an especially large challenge that weekend is objectively impressive, and then during the actual sprint he didn't do anything reactionary when george made the first move on him but also did well to defend carlos and overtake george literally right before the sc or else he would have left max in a position to put a lot more pressure on him by the end and probably would not have won. then his ascension to p2 in the merc bowling incident was very much lucky because he was already on a tighter line and didn't have to take any avoiding action but regardless THIS WAS A GOOD WEEKEND FOR HIM. the fact that he alone scored double the points that ferrari did as a team this weekend (26 > 13)...
japan is oscar's next-best weekend finishing wise but i personally rate it below silverstone for several reasons... silverstone was impressive considering that he was only working with half the upgrades and thanks to cooler temps struggled with less deg and thus his average pace was a lot closer to lando's... (i would point to pace differential in hungary but it's hard to say how much of that was the floor damage from perez). the frustration point is his lack of luck with the safety car and losing out on what would have easily been a podium otherwise, but to come into silverstone with the first half of the upgrades having seen how much lando was able to push in austria and immediately putting the car in the top 3 for quali is i think Very Impressive, because again recalibrating expectations means nothing if you can't live up to them:
japan is like. it was a good weekend but at the same time it's embarrassing... because people love to start wank over team orders and complain about lando's radio when he was right and it would have been so completely foolish to not swap them knowing the difficulties oscar was having on his tyres. it's very much a race where you cannot take away from his podium and the fact that he did quite well overall but you can also see why he didn't get carried away from the result because of how much was left on the table and the fact that he finished 17 seconds behind lando despite getting lucky pitting before the vsc and lando losing time trying to get past checo...
similarly singapore is not really that impressive but it's also important to contextualize that this was the only time he's missed out on q3 since silverstone and it was because of his flyer getting aborted on an extreme-evolution track by lance's inopportune crash at the end of q1. it's "impressive" in the sense that he managed a good start and made up positions by keeping himself out of trouble and having a lucky pit stop and it's nice to know that the car isn't hopeless out of quali, but it also wasn't like crazy or anything in terms of actual overtakes LOL. but it's still nice to say that you made up 10 positions in a race... also singapore was not meant to be That Great for mclaren anyway so it doesn't feel as important but lando qualifying p4 did show that they had the pace to be somewhere around the top 5 which is a bit of a shame.
finally spa is special because well....... 1) it's oscar's favorite track and he's obsessed with it and i think it's always exciting to see your driver thrive in a place he's familiar with!!! 2) sprint shootout p2 by 11 thousandths 🥲 speaking of track familiarity oscar taking p2 in suzuka quali despite having never raced there or even having gone to japan full-stop is very impressive, i feel like i sound kind of hateristic about his performance there but i do really believe it's a high testament to his adaptability/consistency to have shown the one-lap pace he did — lando clearly had the pace advantage on him there and was up on him for most of his best quali lap but oscar kept it together through the end and made up his final hundredths nailing the last braking point and getting on the throttle earlier:
at spa mcl chose to run more downforce and were very reliant on wet weather conditions for the race and a finicky window of grip/pace so i feel like i need to be careful about how i talk about his shootout lap because the amount of df he was running and the fact that max wasn't pushing all the way and was focused more on trying to deliver a clean lap basically explains how he made up an entire second in s2, but i still think the confidence he had throughout the sector shows a lot and it was just a good performance overall... miserable gp with t1 contact and lando floundering for half the race aside it still has special place in my heart ❤️
i feel like i've said enough here... i want to talk about pia vs ric a bit more and then let me sort through the random ending notes i have in this monstrous editor window before i close off. SORRY FOR THIS POST.
THE CASE AGAINST "DRIVING STYLE" / dr retrospective
is oscar better at mclaren than dr ever was? unquestionably.
is oscar a better racing talent than dr in general? i would argue so!
will his career end up being more decorated and empirically impressive than what dr accomplished in his years at red bull and renault and what he may or may not still accomplish playing second fiddle to max come 2024? the bigger question... and one that depends on many many various factors and results but i think the potential is there.
i seriously need to end this post so i might cut a lot of my thoughts short before this actually ends up being 10k words long but the way people talk about daniel at mclaren baffles me sometimes because it's such an unbalanced blame game that seems to frequently mistake explanation for justification. this is to say that we know mclaren's recent design philosophy causes the car to be extremely unpredictable under braking and that it is often prone to understeering, and... well i won't try to sound conclusive re: daniel's weaknesses but from my own understanding it seemed that at red bull his "style" of early braking and forcing his steering input very close to the apex knowing he could trust the car to remain balanced throughout the corner aligned well with the rb's strong front end and aero grip, whereas he struggled a lot more to commit to his braking and get the car rotated in the mclaren. going back to the Technical Feedback discourse i think lando actually said that he and daniel often were aligned in how they felt about the car and how they communicated its driveability, which.......... tells me that daniel did understand its limitations but that he couldn't meaningfully bridge the gap in expected output the way lando was able to. listening to how tom tried to coach him through corners and would use lando as a reference on how to approach entry you can tell how much he floundered in trying to ""transform his style"" without actively understanding the why or how or where different brake/throttle application benefitted him, which in turn created the mindless Bad Habits horner remarked upon his return to the red bull sim.
and i do get it. but i'm also like... umm??? tf. that is not an excuse!
basically: daniel had ingrained habits coming into mclaren that he struggled to overcome because driving the mclaren was too unpredictable and at odds with his comfort zone and he lacked the adaptability that defines elite talent in f1. kimi and seb and many other talents have also veered too much into affinity for under/oversteer, and all this really says of him is that dannyric is a good to great driver, which is still fine and admirable and nothing to scoff at, and of course he's had an excellent career and accomplished many things over the past decade or so. but i feel like conversely people use this excuse of ~well he had Previous Habits~ to downplay for example lando's pace in the car, or to say that daniel thrived cutting his teeth on the 2014-18 era red bull and that "of course oscar is able to get up to speed quicker when he's essentially a blank slate and has known nothing else in f1 (other than testing in the a521) outside of this tricky mclaren!!!" as if this somehow makes it so much easier for them (which is interesting actually because i feel like max and oscar have their own similarities...) and essentially what that does is pose the question of: if lando or oscar were to go to a different team, say the red bull with completely different handling and philosophy, would lando's years at mclaren hinder him significantly? because either it's: they can only drive the mclaren and would be less competitive at other teams so this evens out their ability compared to dr, or dr is the one who's too restrictive and they would be fine and this is an even larger indictment of his true ability. but i guess we can't know that unless they actually go somewhere else....
in short the only driving style anyone should have is whatever maximizes a car's pace and gets them around track fastest against current lap conditions and environment and set-up. and again we can say that oscar got "lucky" getting stuck with a shit car for the first few races of the season so that he had time to acclimate, but just looking at checo essentially admitting that he couldn't handle the rb19's upgrade package and falling completely off by summer break and wanting to return to its original characteristics, being able to actually rise with a car and flip from fighting for spare points and q3 appearances to fighting for podiums and front-row starts and coming week-in and week-out fully delivering to your potential is a skill in and of itself. and for now oscar has proven that. honestly there's more to say re: checo and mentality and to that point even stroll's recent egregious lapse of form but i'm tired.........
also honestly this reminds me of my nux retrospective at the end of last season and i think adaptability is really the biggest intangible that can kind of be mapped across hockey and f1 with similar-ish terminology:
this is to say → if daniel went back to red bull to become max's omeg.... play second fiddle in a car with characteristics he is naturally more in-tune with then he would probably be fine. and it's okay to understand your limitations and utilize your marketability to ingratiate yourself within the sport and prolong the gentle plateau of a career that never peaked as high as you once wanted it to........ that is still a life. and i don't know what the curve of oscar's own trajectory will look like or whether maybe he will encounter similar issues or something else altogether that exposes his limits as a driver, or whether mclaren will ever truly become competitive enough against red bull before the 2026 regs for it to matter, but time will tell and all we can do for now is anticipate as rationally as possible.
FINAL TL;DR
lando is objectively still a better driver than oscar is and people exaggerating the significance of team orders, overthinking their #1/#2 driver dynamic and needlessly critiquing or analyzing the split upgrade schedule are mildly insane. his race pace is simply better full-stop and oscar has a lot of weaknesses that can and will be honed with more experience and time spent racing on-track while getting a feel for the tyres that no amount of simulation can offer you. mclaren's team culture also seems to have improved under stella's restructuring and so far appears to be a semi-functional outfit, plus their pit stops have been genuinely fantastic (1.8 wr!!!!!!) and i believe their pit strategy generally makes sense (a lot of lando's moments of controversial "favoring" can be easily justified aka pitting before oscar in hungary to cover lewis's undercut). stella being appointed to tp literally feels so genius that i'm honestly scared by how much i adore him like i knowww that i'm mildly biased but ugh. i've always said that i appreciated mclaren's commitment to appointing their new tp from within the org and his long record of working with fernando and observing the high and lows at mclaren across the years have clearly set him up perfectly to push the team forward.
*__* also new wind tunnel and the team's general belief in the current car concept for next year......... it's so scary. i don't know what 2024 will bring but definitely more than last year i think mclaren is in a place to come out of the gate being genuinely competitive — of course red bull will still be red bull and i don't have any delusions about actual championship contention but i do want to believe, even if only slightly, in....... i guess a more consistent and even performance throughout the season. how does that lana song go!!! hope is a dangerous thing for a woman to have...............
i'm insane. i don't even know whether i had more to say but at this point i can't keep smashing away at my keyboard or i'll lose it so let me stop here. 2024 will either be great or terrible or kind of bad or really just OK. as per usual
😇
dis was cute too...
anyway i wanted to write this post because despite having shared endless thoughts re: oscar and/or my unfortunate level of investment in mclaren's continued success, i feel like i haven't written a truly objective overview of his performance this season or factually summarized all of my analyses in one area. i revisit my anticipatory 2k23! post somewhat frequently since it contains thorough-ish amounts of investigation into my belief in mclaren's organizational structure and oscar's potential fit onto the team and i thought it would be worth it to attempt a new retrospective now that 17 race weekends (and one essentially historic developmental jump as far as modern regs go...) have come to pass.
before we get started here's a gif to break up the inevitable visual monotony of what will be 8k words of aimless rambling:
INTRO
revisiting ~expectations~
i think it's always been quite difficult to conceptualize oscar's place as a rookie this season for several reasons, part of why being that when individually considered in a vacuum none of these reasons actually straightforwardly decrease or increase his stock, aka everything HAS to be relatively contextualized. what i mean to say is that:
— spending a year out of racing meant he technically sat on the sidelines developing rust, which accomplished two things: 1) lowered some people's expectations of his performance and offered him, whether substantiated or not, increased leeway to not be as good coming out of the gate, because how you can blame someone for performing poorly when they haven't had to show their racecraft in a real race setting for an entire year?, but also 2) heightened other people's hype for him because of essentially the shroud of intrigue and mystery surrounding his year-long marination as alpine reserve and his opting for their extensive testing program over trying his hand at another racing series and potentially (although unspoken) risking disruption of his triple-championship streak. even with time and space it's better to be able to lean into the image of Untapped PotentialTM and to have achieved maximally in the past than it is to hurt your stock in any way possible in recent memory, then add to that a little bit of media hysterics and you will inevitably stumble upon a breeding ground for fan expectations reflecting the intensity of this attention.
— again important to the second point is that it's not like oscar spent the whole year out doing literally nothing, he was very much actively embedded in the f1 world doing sim work and testing the 2021 car (both different regs and different team/characteristics) and being paraded around the paddock filling in with commentary for sky, which means that it's difficult to quantify both how much this mileage and general acclimatization to an f1-team environment benefited his personal development and hence what level of tolerance should have realistically been extended to him after his gap year. for example if we compare him to his two rookie counterparts at the start of the year, we have 1) dick debris fugazi fe champion with objectively low stock from winning f2 in his 3rd year against a laughably uncompetitive grid (goatifi runner-up), but who came in with inflated fanfare from monza and at least having recent championship experience, and then 2) logan who was forced into williams out of necessity as an academy product, unceremoniously rushed into an uncompetitive car and very clearly in need of another year in f2 before he could handle the jump to f1.
i guess the question is then to what degree did oscar having that year to test the a521 instead of entering another racing category help him developmentally (if it did, although i definitely believe that this was at least the optimal approach for him given the situation), and then how does that and piastrigate and dr's sabbatical inform the way people spoke about him coming into this season?
i'll speak about this more later but mclaren's 2023 season being marked by two clearly delineated halves also obviously adds dimension to his performances and the 20/20 hindsight of last year's contractual risks & decisions. now that we are where we are, it's easy to say that oscar is lucky to be in mclaren thanks to 1) alpine organizational incompetence and 2) seidl and webber's porsche connection, which is also funny to reflect on considering seidl was (in a sense, ambiguously) let go of in the first place and has since come to be seen as semi-responsible for the technical hold-ups of the accelerated development the car experienced this year... regardless it's a take people are much more wont to uphold now that there is quantifiable evidence to support his decisions, even though i already believed last year when i wrote my first post that it was a good move, still believed it to be so during winter testing and after bahrain and throughout the unreliability-tractor half of the year etc., but i guess now it is nice to be awarded even tentative vindication from some dividends being paid.
more on this later but... tl;dr expectations:
[ FAN / PUNDIT EXPECTATION ]
> one of the most insane nico quotes from last year re: oscar joining mclaren was that "it's either he beats lando or he's out" ... well actually people were saying a lot of shit (jense self-reflecting on his palou moment, toto inappropriately projecting oscar's situation onto his own perception of junior teams and the role academy drivers are meant to fulfill because mercedes obviously has the legal department to avoid Incidents Of The Sort) but i think this one is specifically reflective of misguided pundit/fan sentiment that oscar had folded himself into a precarious situation betting on himself by joining mclaren. of course not everyone subscribed to such binary extreme, but the general connotation of oscar thinking himself "too good" for williams/alpine definitely prevailed and defined most of the pressure he faced coming into the season. again this remains an oversimplification in that the williams offer had never been formally presented to him at the time of his mclaren communications and alpine's allegedly binding contracts sat in an elaborate web of presumptive legal falsification, so essentially he never chose mclaren over williams or alpine but over quite literally Nothing, and objectively there is no point debating the hypotheticals of where he should have gone for his rookie season. HOWEVER. that of course is not going to stop the alpine/mclaren fans from scrutinizing the car's full-season potential and their own respective team environments. so it is what it is.
> dick debris.......... what was this bullet point going to be i really just wrote down "dick debris" 12 hours ago like i was ever going to remember my fully formulated thought. i think i was going to say that a good amount of people massively overrated his f2/fe championship experience coming into this season, which is another point toward aka26 discourse of >IT IS POSSIBLE TO CONTEXTUALIZE FEEDER SERIES CHAMPIONSHIPS< even if there are massive nuances to transitioning into f1, f1 and f2's inherent differences (chassis/car design/general development/race length/pit strategy-wise but also environment/pressure/team building-wise, etc. etc. and so on and so forth), but regardless of my rating ndv extremely poorly coming into this season a good chunk of people honestly betted on him to be the best rookie (gurl. in an alphatauri 😭 see autorsport comments from march) which somewhat influenced general anticipation for oscar's debut. i think again it's just like, well speculation is the name of the game in f1 fandom so there were also plenty of people who thought ndv was ass but who would then also obsess over oscar's f3 title fight and argue back and forth about his drs difficulties and logan's quali pace etc., but... I'VE GONE OVER THIS BEFORE WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS.
> alpine fans are contractually obligated to bet on his downfall so that was normal and expected but there were definitely a lot of complex emotions on the mclaren side as well from dr3 fans (hating him for taking dr's seat, finding him dry and boring, wanting him to do poorly to vindicate dr) and to some degree lando fans alike (honestly the biggest one just being doubting the potential of their teammate dynamic lol)... i would say these perceptions were highest amongst the ig/tt girlies but they were definitely out there and extremely widespread!
[ TEAM EXPECTATION ]
> of course at the end of the day this is the only thing that really matters... i think it's really difficult to properly Quantify what a "strong" rookie showing looks like because it's so dependent on various factors, car performance obviously being the core of it but then even things like point totals and percentages are influenced by the relative trend of said performance, because take (for example) even just the gap in points-scoring between the top 3 and bottom 3 — where scoring a certain % of your teammates points does not look the same if you're both constantly finishing p9/p10 vs p2/p3, even though technically the average finishing difference would be the same, and then especially with a car like the mcl60 swinging widely between these extremes it's important to be able to contextualize such discrepancies. BUT ANYWAY. i think the team knew exactly what they wanted out of oscar and with fairly robust confidence what they needed out of him to consider his rookie year a success. i think more than "beating dr last year" by any restrictive set of objectives, there is a holistic rookie package to consider along the axes of: error proneness, adaptability to the car's specific quirks or unpredictability, consistency in quali, race craft, tyre management and subsequent race pace, technical feedback, and then as an extension to that feedback the ability to correctly identify cause-and-effect at the proper junction of on-track performance loss*, aka having a general grasp of where and which weaknesses need to be rectified (because sometimes "car problems" are in fact self-generated; can you understand that you approached a corner suboptimally without needing the data to back it with feedback delay?). again what mclaren (probably) wanted from oscar was → guy who could adapt to the mclaren's tricky characteristics and wouldn't find it at odds with his ""style"" (MORE ON THIS LATER) → rookie who doesn't constantly bin it or put it in the gravel → guy who is generally capable of keeping close to lando on one-lap pace and shows raw promise in race pace even if there are still kinks to iron out that can basically only come with experience. then this goes back to How do you measure "keeping close" relative to dr but... i will try to unravel this more in the h2h section
*eta: just listened to astella btg podcast which corroborated this... "as he does this sort of (slow-speed corner) development journey, what impressed us is his awareness. his awareness of what the opportunities are, even before he looks at an overlay or looks at any telemetry. he kind of has this capacity to self-recognize where there is more to come from either himself or from the car, and this is not so obvious. i know drivers that can be fast, but they kind of definitely need external support as to see what is possible."
public perception / persona / pr
i have a lot of thoughts on how oscar presents himself as a person and how his current character & rookie status influence both his place in the grid & fandom's perception of his performance. i remember when i made this gifset in... may and i tagged it with "#my stonks when people realize he's charming and witty and has normalgirl cringefail swag 📈" which i think kind of summarizes his slow rise (well actually it's been quite rapid when i think back on it LOL i was not expecting people to like him so quickly!!!) to f1 popularity this season. oscar is interesting to me because he literally loves karmawhoring and was obsessed with going viral for his drs tweets back in f3 and basically is very open about his personality or making quips despite his growing reputation for being "cold" and a mentality monster, plus it's also clear from the kinds of dr/ln jokes he laughs at that he has extremely immature humor and is very amused by the Other Lads but mostly just doesn't have any desire to be the one making the joke in the first place ("uh... daniel and i have very different personalities" re: daniel tripping major nutsack quote), so there is this fine balance between being cheeky sarcastic aussie and alleged kimi reincarnate that creates a lot of tolerance for him in people. of course some are less endeared (the pgas girlies who were calling for his mom's head for liking that otmar tweet lol) and i think there's potential for the whole family's social media usage to cool down eventually, but the way people talk about oscar's personality is interesting... the scale essentially extends from → wow he is so boring and dry and has 0 personality i could not care less about him (understandable) to → his mentality is insane this is why he's going to be the next wdc and lando is going to become mclaren's second driver and get forced into early retirement (brah).
i think it is in a sports fan's nature to want to extrapolate conclusive meaning from intangibles (dawg/60) which usually extends into a psychological triangle of 1) how do you anticipate hardship 2) how do you react during hardship and 3) how do you move on from hardship after it's happened — to which point the requisite mentality upheld by fans as "ideal" is highly dependent on the sport itself and its team and/or individual nature. the problem i think for me is when this is seen as factually informative of a person's ceiling above demonstrable measures of their actual performance, and as much as oscar's even-keel personality is something that draws me to him as a fan and is what i've liked about him for a long time i hesitate largely to conflate his alleged "maturity" with the profile of a Potential Champion. also the other day i was like.... i mean natemac has a total hair-trigger personality and got his stanley cup so who even cares. of course that's another simplification but in the end i think the right combination of ego and ruthlessness and team cooperation is obviously enviable but in practice can also be limiting when used to obscure the reality of a driver's actionable strengths & weaknesses. this kind of sounds like i'm calling oscar a pr merchant who knows how to capitalize off the good will of all kimiluvrs out there who call him an inverse-bottas finnish aussie and vote him in for dotd just because he's putting the car in a decent place as a rookie even when his performance lacks the wow factor dotd is technically meant to highlight which is kind of funny because he replaced the biggest pr merchant in the sport coming into mcl so i don't even think it's that bad it's just like.......... well as always there are dimensions to "authenticity" as a celebrity product and we can acknowledgee that. (this is getting too tangential let me get back on track)
don't get me wrong though i do love oscar's radios... see: "oscar i can hear you're pretty excited..." "that's as excited as i get for second place!" i think as much as it's >oscar isn't going to overreact to a sprint top-3 or a quali p2 or whatever because he knows that he's destined for more and truly believes he has what it takes to win, i also like that oscar is capable of recognizing the representative value of each of his accomplishments and beyond just the sentiment of "i can do better than a sprint win" he lowkey thinks celebrating a sprint win is a bit embarrassing and cringe because it's not real LOL. imo his f2 radios were frequently more lively and animated and i wonder how much of that is natural personality growth over 2 years but then also i think if mclaren do manage a full season of being properly competitive and he faces tough racing moments or inopportune contact more often when the points truly "matter" then we will see additional agitation slip through (insert that one quote about if someone takes me out on the last lap for the lead THERE WILL BE WORDS from whatever prema video), and then if he ever gets a proper pole or *knock on wood* wins a real race that will obviously unlock another layer of his personality as well... but we shall see.
ok i have more on his personality but let me get to the actual section that this post was supposed to be about WHY is this intro 3000 words long.
SEASON OVERVIEW
lando interlude
honestly the whole reason i started writing this post was because i kept seeing wank about how oscar is threatening lando's position as #1 driver in the team and a lot of misguided takes re: recent team orders and basically the entirety of qat weekend. for me this goes back to unnecessary psychological extrapolation and recency bias and needing to generalize isolated performance lapses as overwhelmingly representative of a driver's faults. lando... can be hard to talk about because i do genuinely rate him sooo highly and quite objectively consider him an extremely consistent and reliable driver with a proven q3 track record, but he's also been increasingly faulted for cracking under pressure and failing to step up at "critical" moments when opportunities show themselves (which again i do think when we say ~pressure~ that it's important to clarify whether that means as a product of teammate competitiveness or of a desire to maximize car performance since these types of pressure do overlap but aren't necessarily mutually inclusive... i digress): sochi 2021, monza 2021, and now qatar 2023. i guess if anything needs to be the ProblemTM with lando, then you can point back to his admission during the 2019 rookies revisited video of how he wasn't living in the moment in f2 because he was more focused on his f1 seat and george responding in kind that that's why he won the title, which was imparted cheekily but also is a clear reminder of → everything is a process and a progression and getting ahead of yourself is the real killer. maybe there's some merit to lando's anticipatory attitude occasionally getting the best of him, because often i feel like my own hopium walks such a fine line with him where i know he's one of the most clear-eyed and objective guys on the grid in terms of evaluating pace & driveability so when he's finally mildly positive about the car or team it inspires genuine confidence in me, but then when he's Too Confident or carefree the sochi-adjacent ONE (1) FEAR emotions start stirring in me despite my own rationality.
At the same time.............. i don't know. not sure how i really feel about this rhetoric. i don't think that evaluating lando's "mentality" by these specific low points is necessarily nitpicking or anything because they are real and they did happen, and a stinker is a stinker and you can acknowledge that and understand where he's coming from when he calls himself shit with startling frankness, but at the same time his overall consistency and relative "cleanness" weigh much higher in my evaluation of his driving. so it's a delicate balance.
honestly with how i talk about lando now and looking back on oscar's f2 reputation i feel like ...! well obviously mclaren wanted oscar because he's good full-stop and had the results to back it, but when you look at their qualities it kind of seems as though he and lando look very similar on paper and that a lot of what made oscar successful in f2 (great one-lap pace + sheer adaptability + knowing when to take risks) are all things lando is lauded for... one of my favorite astella quotes from earlier on their similar terminology and technical feedback:
The second element, which is remarkable this year, is how similar the comments are between the two drivers.
"And this is not only in the offline debriefings, but it's also when the drivers come back after they run the first run during a session. They actually use the same terminology, like it looks like they are in communication before reporting their feedback."
this is kind of funny because in newey's book he's like "markseb were the dream engineering pairing because seb had strong mechanical instincts and an obsessive feel for the tyres but couldn't perceive any aero changes so mark complemented all of his technical feedback" and then... honestly i don't even know with dr because from everything i've seen it's like, on the maxiel side max was like "well i liked having daniel around because he complained about the same things i did" but then his biggest weakness was allegedly having very limited technical understanding of f1 cars in general, but conversely he also claimed to be good at giving feedback based off his instinctive feel for the car's driveability which doesn't actually TELL me anything because because that could be So Many Things. i think evaluating "driver feedback" and "technical knowhow" is always somewhat difficult unless it's as with newey or another engineer explicitly detailing what is being offered because even the... ermmm more ~detail-oriented~ drivers aren't necessarily more useful or productive if they can't communicate their point across in a translatable manner or worse if their "suggestions" are misguided self-translations that lead engineers down the wrong path where simply communicating the problem in the same manner as a less technically-savvy driver might have saved them all of that time in the first place. so i never know how much any of this even really matters... or whether it's Good Or Bad Or Just OK that landoscar run so parallel in their technical output.
i think generally fans are often very desperate to determine a clear pecking order within contending teams and that mclaren is no exception, but when you look at red bull's current dominance the reality of it is that the importance of competing against your teammate (especially given mcl's wcc position and oscar's rookie status) is relatively nerfed by the absence of any true championship aspirations. therefore what's interesting about the Best Lineup debates and max gassing 814 up in post-race press and people saying "well right now merc/fer are strongest but mcl have the most potential" is that with merc it's very much....... how to say. imo the ego battle is a lot more pronounced over there even if of course it's not like brocedes level of implosive toxicity and some incidents have also been blown out of proportion, but just the very composition of lewis's position in the team as proven 7x wdc and george escaping williams the year merc stopped being properly competitive have set up a really strange tone for the team, and to that point i do wonder how much our evaluation of how "good" a lineup is includes Team Order Cooperation and ability to work together and to be harmoniously consistent independent of individual driver caliber. in theory i think mclaren's ability to have two drivers who can run close to each other without needing to discern a clear #1/#2 role is a good problem to have, especially if max is max and red bull is red bull and adrian newey is adrian newey................ but.
let's be real oscar is never going to be So Good that he ends lando's whole entire career because no matter what people say lando is better than carlos and better than daniel and has all the makings of a team leader. the million-dollar question really is just, if you have two promising talents who are known for being very clean and consistent (or, one of them is known for it and the other has brought in similar qualities from f2, and then whether these qualities will fully transition over to f1 is still semi-unknown), how will that dynamic adjust itself face with real competitive pressure? of course i do not know ! but always interesting to think about. also i lowkey don't rate george so i do believe mclaren have the best driver lineup rn 😇
anyway season overview. winter testing...... mcl60 design........... bahrain disasterclass. frankly speaking i don't even know where to begin so here's a very rough summative diagram for reference:
i feel like we could delve more into the race-by-race of the first half of the season if we really wanted to but in the end what it comes down to is: the mcl60 was an objectively bad car with a flawed design that missed important developmental targets coming into pre-season testing and of which its pace reflected even more unflatteringly during the first few races thanks to a spat of early reliability issues and mechanical failures. oscar windows xp moment, lando having to pit 6 times in bahrain because of a pressure leak that dramatically limited his stints and only staying out to farm data, having to take a new engine in literally the 2nd race of the season...... It was bad! but being able to look back on how the team navigated that half of the season and the early strides it took to restructure in march prior to these woes is also important.
key (no pun intended) to the technical leadership overhaul was the appointment of andrea stella to the tp role over winter when andreas jumped ship to sauber following vasseur's promotion to ferrari. to be clear i still like andreas, and i think the blame game regarding mclaren's slow development and conceptual flaws and fundamental aerodynamic weaknesses is one that rests entirely on speculation, but i love speculation so i will engage in it anyway:
1. i think andreas seidl did a lot of good in his time at mclaren and i empathetically believe that key had a lot working against him that wasn't always necessarily his fault, and i understand that he has a proven record from his at days and that there is a lot of potential to be found in his continued partnership with seidl now that they've reunited at sauber.
2. however seidl left of his own accord to chase the audi dream whereas key was very much pushed aside once stella was given the reins and the power to reassess the team's existing culture and logistical bottlenecks, which uhhhh... i think says a lot. i'm trying to word this in a semi-diplomatic way so as to clarify that seidl is maybe a bit at fault for making him "his guy" but that there isn't necessarily a Fault to be found in some of key's failures as technical director really, but also that... like. let me try again.
3. the mcl35(m) was mclaren's last competitive car and technically an extension of pat fry's design from the mcl34 era. of course it was still redesigned extensively under key's direction and it's not to say that he wasn't pulling his weight there, but under the new regulations the mcl36 was the first car that was really truly his and his first chance to prove himself as a designer. conundrum here is therefore — where did it all fall apart? the thing with mclaren's development across those years is that you can empathize with the fact that covid hindered their efficiency, with how many resources had gone into developing new facilities and getting the on-site wind tunnel fully operational and the logistical nightmares of needing to securely transport their test model to and from an ancient rented facility out in cologne, so to some degree i think key just didn't have a lot to work with. and sometimes when you reach a specific sequence of bottlenecks in such a manner that you really have no other solution than to just Wait For It........ i can understand how it gets limiting. it stretches resources and personnel thin, disrupts timelines and targets and then contingencies for the timelines and targets and enables suboptimal reactionary decisions that then inevitably reflect poorly on the oversight of the technical director, regardless of how much he was able to control or plan for.
4. but then again that is the job. and maybe the man just didn't understand how to make a car work with ground effect aero. maybe that was his fault, and then instead of finding a way to course correct for the mcl60 the concept remained lackluster and the targets remained unmet and the productiveness of the team and culture within the technical department suffered for it. and i think that stella recognizing... not just that the design direction was flawed but also that key's conservative recourse in introducing upgrades to the car and refusing to push the limits of how much it could be developed, and then not only replacing him with one guy of similar experience but instead attempting a three-pronged leadership approach in order to redistribute responsibility, lighten collaborative burden and introduce better communicative ease amongst branches of the department is reallyyy savvy.
FRANKLY MANY THINGS TO SAY ABOUT ANDREA STELLA I SHOULD WRITE A WHOLE POST JUST ABOUT HIM. i mean disclaimer that i don't know whether any of these changes will actually be GOOD in the long run but i think perhaps key's struggles on the aero side (as well as stella's own personal experience of being on winning teams and seeing how highly successful outfits were run during their glory days) maybe influenced stella to place dedicated personnel in the aero branch so he could then have sanchez directly on car concept come winter (after gardening leave). aka tl;dr i think to some degree key really was just in over his head and that it then snowballed the way dr's issues and incompatibilities snowballed, and if you have a driver who is only capable of incremental amounts of readjustment and who is at odds with your technical vision and you don't have the wind tunnel data or the facilities to really be able to develop the car in a meaningful way to become faster or somehow work around his weaknesses then you can imagine how mclaren was literally stuck in a bind for his entire tenure, not that even this year they would be doing much development to accommodate dr's """style""" (bleh) but you understand what i mean here. hopefully
anyway tl;dr for the third time i'm based and andreastellapilled. i need to write another disclaimer for 2024 at the end of this post but before that we have to move on TO >ACTUAL OSCAR TALK< so here's a small andrea quote about him as an indulgent transition ❤️
So far his performance is possibly beyond what we expected. [...] He keeps being very humble, which is a beautiful trait, from a personal point of view. So he lets facts and results speak for themselves.
a 30-year age gap never hurt anyone 🙈🙉🙊 why is only fernando allowed to fuck the earnest bleeding-heart middle-aged itali.... nvm. okay
OP81 STATS AS OF QATAR GP:
- 9th in wdc (83 points, 61.03% of lando)
- 2 podiums
- 1 sprint pole + podium + win
- 2 dnfs
- 9.88 quali average (vs. checo 9.18, lando 7.65)
- 12.78 before silverstone
- 6.63 silverstone onward (5.14 excluding sgp q1 exit)
- 64.7% q3 appearance rate
- 87.5% silverstone onward
like i said before, the mcl60 was transformed over the course of the season with a three-tiered upgrade schedule, the first package being a holdover from key's work but the final two (hun/gbr and sin) almost fundamentally redesigning every aerodynamic aspect of the car under stella's direction, which considering the massive gains mclaren have made with those upgrades is very promising... even if having any expectations for a reliable season-start as a mclaren fan is naive at this point. i think also just the clear communication of weaknesses over the season on stella's side and creating well-segmented understanding of what needs to be revised in time for specific tracks or for entire parts of the calendar is important for the fans, like silverstone was special in how perfectly timed the upgrades were to coincide with the team/lando's home race on a high-speed circuit even if drag issues persisted afterward (alex albon monza choo choo noise) and the car's performance remained inconsistent, requiring very specific tracks or very specific set-ups and characteristics to shine, like the tricky mixed conditions at spa... lately we've been lucky with tracks that suit us but at the same time carrying momentum and timing upgrades for when they'll be best maximized is part of good structural vision in the first place.
anyway how does oscar fit into this!!! i guess a few things first:
1. OVERALL PICTURE: oscar is having a fantastic rookie season... i don't know if i've said this outright so i'm saying it now. honestly it's easy to want to compare him to other high-caliber rookies (or even the competition he has right now if you want to really inflate his ego...), but if we simply put his performances into a vacuum and revisit the "holistic rookie profile" i mentioned before then everything he's been doing so far really does point him in the right direction. he has the one-lap pace, has mostly stayed out of trouble and hasn't been responsible for an unholy amount of unforced errors or crashes (dutch fp2 aside), and most of all has been steadily praised for his ability to absorb information and improve incrementally from his side of the garage. obviously the team values him and he suits its culture and vision well considering that he's been extended through 2026.
honestly the funniest thing is how much oscar gets compared to literally every driver of mark's era EXCEPT for mark himself (in terms of driving and results). oscarmark are insane because oscar is literally........... ok. how to say. for all that he's an "unassuming" and methodical character, people love to extract narrative references for him from the entirety of the lewis/jense/seb/kimi/nando/etc. group!!! aka lewis is lewis plus testing regs so the eras are purely incomparable but people love to mention him because meh generational mclaren rookies, then with seb because of markseb teammate friction and mark living vicariously through oscar and seeing him as the champion-caliber driver he could never be now that he's years removed from his perception of seb's "immaturity" even if past the frame of young raw potential they are indeed quite different, jense in terms of being prost-like and having smooth inputs and i think maybe to some degree also the tendency to "build up" to pace over a weekend and having self-confidence in not rushing performance and finding gaps during practice instead of approaching every session uniformly, then kimi i guess is also really just a personality comparison but. i almost feel like oscar embodies a very "classic" (???) or steady/assured character that makes people want to compare him to that crop of late 2000s drivers which i frankly see less in other recent rookies??? maybe i just read more oscar wank and this is completely off-base and i'm delusional. REGARDLESS...
2. ADAPTABILITY: honestly i don't want to use the word "lucky" in this post because often we make our own luck and any sense of relief for the season is hypothetical and who knows what could have happened if the car we have now had shown up in bahrain, but i do generally believe that in spite of early season woes oscar was very much placed in a favorable position coming in as a rookie with a gap year and having not just a poorly-performing car but a poorly-performing car with some roughly concrete plan for eventual upgrades that set a benchmark for when he could be expected to better fight for points. so essentially he was given proper time to acclimate without people breathing down his neck for being outperformed by lando, was in a rough spot but not one so bleakly ambiguous that it amounted to "well this is just going to be shit forever because we don't know how to develop the car meaningfully", got his feet wet learning how the team navigated various mech issues and experienced enough disappointment to not inflate his expectations — not that i think this would have been a problem for him anyway but you know adversity is still good generally.
maybe it is lucky that oscar happened to come into mcl in 2023 instead of joining alpine or mclaren last year because he definitely would not have scored 80+ points in either of those cars, but regardless of how strong the mclaren is it's very much a testament to his adaptability that he's been able to step up to the challenge and be roughly in line with lando when given the same package, and the fact that he hasn't gotten completely strolled and Actively Grew with the team's developments is i think what this comes down to and why he's viewed so strongly. even if he does show some glaring weaknesses or lapses of rookie-dependent inexperience and naivety! in the end maybe it is: he's gotten up to speed better than dr3 ever could and that's enough at the end of the day. maybe i wrote this entire post just to circle back to the same conclusion... damn. another astella quote:
There is no external noise in his brain. He doesn’t dissipate or dilute his talent into things that are not useful or functional, and that was apparent to us relatively early on.
3. WEAKNESSES: i could write a lot here but i want to contextualize them in the next bullet point by talking about specific weekends so i'll be brief: oscar's biggest weakness is his race pace. we can talk about how one-lap pace is what reflects a driver's ceiling but at the moment his main woes are a combination of poor tyre management and subsequent lack of pace and ability to maintain position. i guess you can also argue that he lacks the race experience to know when to push certain limits e.g. on starts with the sainz collision, also i find he's had quite a few poor sc restarts so there are other little things to iron out but those aren't as glaringly identifiable......
4. INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCES: i want to rank my personal favorite/most impressive weekends of oscar's because i don't think finishing position or being dotd properly reflects his actual performance every time... also useful to reference this and split-upgrade model in his h2h with lando.
- (QAT) race p2 + sprint shootout pole + sprint race p1
- (GBR) p4 or first almost-podium + first quali p3
- (JPN) front row start and first podium (p3)
- (BEL) p2 in quali by 11 thousandths + sprint race p2
- (SIN) making up 10 places from p17 → p7
ok let's see... i'll try to be brief. imo qatar is oscar's best showing yet even if not in terms of pure pace, it's such a mindfuck to talk about because of the mandatory pit stops eliminating or i guess i should say transforming the kind of race strategy it required, which in the end benefitted both oscar and mclaren greatly because one of red bull's great strengths is managing long stints — this meant oscar could essentially push flat-out the entire time and "put in 57 quali laps" and (somewhat artificially) close down that 30+ second gap on max in the last few laps with his final pit stop. nevertheless i think this was a great showing from oscar on the side of 1) consistency and not making crucial errors where everyone else did, 2) POINT 3 OF ADVERSITY TRIANGLE: how do you react to hardship (getting his lap time deleted mid-interview and then responding with sprint pole the next day), and then 3) managing the sprint well and not letting the soft running strategy get the best of him, taking the right risks and eventually holding off max for the victory. like yes lando was up on him in his final run for the sprint shootout but consistency and error-proneness are still identifiable qualities of a skilled driver so the fact that he was the one who strung it together for sprint pole (even if not a full reflection of pace) when track limits were an especially large challenge that weekend is objectively impressive, and then during the actual sprint he didn't do anything reactionary when george made the first move on him but also did well to defend carlos and overtake george literally right before the sc or else he would have left max in a position to put a lot more pressure on him by the end and probably would not have won. then his ascension to p2 in the merc bowling incident was very much lucky because he was already on a tighter line and didn't have to take any avoiding action but regardless THIS WAS A GOOD WEEKEND FOR HIM. the fact that he alone scored double the points that ferrari did as a team this weekend (26 > 13)...
japan is oscar's next-best weekend finishing wise but i personally rate it below silverstone for several reasons... silverstone was impressive considering that he was only working with half the upgrades and thanks to cooler temps struggled with less deg and thus his average pace was a lot closer to lando's... (i would point to pace differential in hungary but it's hard to say how much of that was the floor damage from perez). the frustration point is his lack of luck with the safety car and losing out on what would have easily been a podium otherwise, but to come into silverstone with the first half of the upgrades having seen how much lando was able to push in austria and immediately putting the car in the top 3 for quali is i think Very Impressive, because again recalibrating expectations means nothing if you can't live up to them:
japan is like. it was a good weekend but at the same time it's embarrassing... because people love to start wank over team orders and complain about lando's radio when he was right and it would have been so completely foolish to not swap them knowing the difficulties oscar was having on his tyres. it's very much a race where you cannot take away from his podium and the fact that he did quite well overall but you can also see why he didn't get carried away from the result because of how much was left on the table and the fact that he finished 17 seconds behind lando despite getting lucky pitting before the vsc and lando losing time trying to get past checo...
similarly singapore is not really that impressive but it's also important to contextualize that this was the only time he's missed out on q3 since silverstone and it was because of his flyer getting aborted on an extreme-evolution track by lance's inopportune crash at the end of q1. it's "impressive" in the sense that he managed a good start and made up positions by keeping himself out of trouble and having a lucky pit stop and it's nice to know that the car isn't hopeless out of quali, but it also wasn't like crazy or anything in terms of actual overtakes LOL. but it's still nice to say that you made up 10 positions in a race... also singapore was not meant to be That Great for mclaren anyway so it doesn't feel as important but lando qualifying p4 did show that they had the pace to be somewhere around the top 5 which is a bit of a shame.
finally spa is special because well....... 1) it's oscar's favorite track and he's obsessed with it and i think it's always exciting to see your driver thrive in a place he's familiar with!!! 2) sprint shootout p2 by 11 thousandths 🥲 speaking of track familiarity oscar taking p2 in suzuka quali despite having never raced there or even having gone to japan full-stop is very impressive, i feel like i sound kind of hateristic about his performance there but i do really believe it's a high testament to his adaptability/consistency to have shown the one-lap pace he did — lando clearly had the pace advantage on him there and was up on him for most of his best quali lap but oscar kept it together through the end and made up his final hundredths nailing the last braking point and getting on the throttle earlier:
at spa mcl chose to run more downforce and were very reliant on wet weather conditions for the race and a finicky window of grip/pace so i feel like i need to be careful about how i talk about his shootout lap because the amount of df he was running and the fact that max wasn't pushing all the way and was focused more on trying to deliver a clean lap basically explains how he made up an entire second in s2, but i still think the confidence he had throughout the sector shows a lot and it was just a good performance overall... miserable gp with t1 contact and lando floundering for half the race aside it still has special place in my heart ❤️
i feel like i've said enough here... i want to talk about pia vs ric a bit more and then let me sort through the random ending notes i have in this monstrous editor window before i close off. SORRY FOR THIS POST.
THE CASE AGAINST "DRIVING STYLE" / dr retrospective
"He is incredibly calm all of the time," Tom says. "He is very calm, very mature and very unfazed. Oscar is also very adaptable, and it is very impressive how he has been able to modulate his inputs and adjust his braking and turning to get the best out of the car.
"He has made a lot of progress, and I think he now understands very clearly what the car needs. He has been able to deliver that very effectively, and we are very excited by that."
is oscar better at mclaren than dr ever was? unquestionably.
is oscar a better racing talent than dr in general? i would argue so!
will his career end up being more decorated and empirically impressive than what dr accomplished in his years at red bull and renault and what he may or may not still accomplish playing second fiddle to max come 2024? the bigger question... and one that depends on many many various factors and results but i think the potential is there.
i seriously need to end this post so i might cut a lot of my thoughts short before this actually ends up being 10k words long but the way people talk about daniel at mclaren baffles me sometimes because it's such an unbalanced blame game that seems to frequently mistake explanation for justification. this is to say that we know mclaren's recent design philosophy causes the car to be extremely unpredictable under braking and that it is often prone to understeering, and... well i won't try to sound conclusive re: daniel's weaknesses but from my own understanding it seemed that at red bull his "style" of early braking and forcing his steering input very close to the apex knowing he could trust the car to remain balanced throughout the corner aligned well with the rb's strong front end and aero grip, whereas he struggled a lot more to commit to his braking and get the car rotated in the mclaren. going back to the Technical Feedback discourse i think lando actually said that he and daniel often were aligned in how they felt about the car and how they communicated its driveability, which.......... tells me that daniel did understand its limitations but that he couldn't meaningfully bridge the gap in expected output the way lando was able to. listening to how tom tried to coach him through corners and would use lando as a reference on how to approach entry you can tell how much he floundered in trying to ""transform his style"" without actively understanding the why or how or where different brake/throttle application benefitted him, which in turn created the mindless Bad Habits horner remarked upon his return to the red bull sim.
and i do get it. but i'm also like... umm??? tf. that is not an excuse!
basically: daniel had ingrained habits coming into mclaren that he struggled to overcome because driving the mclaren was too unpredictable and at odds with his comfort zone and he lacked the adaptability that defines elite talent in f1. kimi and seb and many other talents have also veered too much into affinity for under/oversteer, and all this really says of him is that dannyric is a good to great driver, which is still fine and admirable and nothing to scoff at, and of course he's had an excellent career and accomplished many things over the past decade or so. but i feel like conversely people use this excuse of ~well he had Previous Habits~ to downplay for example lando's pace in the car, or to say that daniel thrived cutting his teeth on the 2014-18 era red bull and that "of course oscar is able to get up to speed quicker when he's essentially a blank slate and has known nothing else in f1 (other than testing in the a521) outside of this tricky mclaren!!!" as if this somehow makes it so much easier for them (which is interesting actually because i feel like max and oscar have their own similarities...) and essentially what that does is pose the question of: if lando or oscar were to go to a different team, say the red bull with completely different handling and philosophy, would lando's years at mclaren hinder him significantly? because either it's: they can only drive the mclaren and would be less competitive at other teams so this evens out their ability compared to dr, or dr is the one who's too restrictive and they would be fine and this is an even larger indictment of his true ability. but i guess we can't know that unless they actually go somewhere else....
in short the only driving style anyone should have is whatever maximizes a car's pace and gets them around track fastest against current lap conditions and environment and set-up. and again we can say that oscar got "lucky" getting stuck with a shit car for the first few races of the season so that he had time to acclimate, but just looking at checo essentially admitting that he couldn't handle the rb19's upgrade package and falling completely off by summer break and wanting to return to its original characteristics, being able to actually rise with a car and flip from fighting for spare points and q3 appearances to fighting for podiums and front-row starts and coming week-in and week-out fully delivering to your potential is a skill in and of itself. and for now oscar has proven that. honestly there's more to say re: checo and mentality and to that point even stroll's recent egregious lapse of form but i'm tired.........
also honestly this reminds me of my nux retrospective at the end of last season and i think adaptability is really the biggest intangible that can kind of be mapped across hockey and f1 with similar-ish terminology:
i think miller is just a very specific type of personality and player archetype and that makes [his and petey's] dynamic easy to scrutinize, but while i believe he is reflective of a larger cultural problem in vancouver it’s not necessarily in the most straightforward sense, and maybe presenting it that way is unfair to him. like i do think how a player self-motivates and responds to coaching expectations is always going to be unique, and thus it’s never so much about the universal value a coaching system brings to a team but rather how much each player’s skillset and personality naturally complements the inherent dynamics of it. of course, it still falls onto the player to be adaptable, and when it comes to game-breaking talent or hockey iq there is an expectation that they can perform past the limitations of a restrictive or uninspired system, but obviously you can’t expect that of every player in the league and i think it’s understandable to say at the base level that certain players just need x or y to be productive and cannot perform maximally when expectations are loose or otherwise unstructured. miller does not have an elite gamer mindset but that’s fine. you can still be a largely effective player that way
this is to say → if daniel went back to red bull to become max's omeg.... play second fiddle in a car with characteristics he is naturally more in-tune with then he would probably be fine. and it's okay to understand your limitations and utilize your marketability to ingratiate yourself within the sport and prolong the gentle plateau of a career that never peaked as high as you once wanted it to........ that is still a life. and i don't know what the curve of oscar's own trajectory will look like or whether maybe he will encounter similar issues or something else altogether that exposes his limits as a driver, or whether mclaren will ever truly become competitive enough against red bull before the 2026 regs for it to matter, but time will tell and all we can do for now is anticipate as rationally as possible.
FINAL TL;DR
lando is objectively still a better driver than oscar is and people exaggerating the significance of team orders, overthinking their #1/#2 driver dynamic and needlessly critiquing or analyzing the split upgrade schedule are mildly insane. his race pace is simply better full-stop and oscar has a lot of weaknesses that can and will be honed with more experience and time spent racing on-track while getting a feel for the tyres that no amount of simulation can offer you. mclaren's team culture also seems to have improved under stella's restructuring and so far appears to be a semi-functional outfit, plus their pit stops have been genuinely fantastic (1.8 wr!!!!!!) and i believe their pit strategy generally makes sense (a lot of lando's moments of controversial "favoring" can be easily justified aka pitting before oscar in hungary to cover lewis's undercut). stella being appointed to tp literally feels so genius that i'm honestly scared by how much i adore him like i knowww that i'm mildly biased but ugh. i've always said that i appreciated mclaren's commitment to appointing their new tp from within the org and his long record of working with fernando and observing the high and lows at mclaren across the years have clearly set him up perfectly to push the team forward.
*__* also new wind tunnel and the team's general belief in the current car concept for next year......... it's so scary. i don't know what 2024 will bring but definitely more than last year i think mclaren is in a place to come out of the gate being genuinely competitive — of course red bull will still be red bull and i don't have any delusions about actual championship contention but i do want to believe, even if only slightly, in....... i guess a more consistent and even performance throughout the season. how does that lana song go!!! hope is a dangerous thing for a woman to have...............
i'm insane. i don't even know whether i had more to say but at this point i can't keep smashing away at my keyboard or i'll lose it so let me stop here. 2024 will either be great or terrible or kind of bad or really just OK. as per usual
dis was cute too...
no subject
Date: 2023-10-28 05:36 pm (UTC)some interesting insights: "plus it's also clear from the kinds of dr/ln jokes he laughs at that he has extremely immature humor and is very amused by the Other Lads but mostly just doesn't have any desire to be the one making the joke in the first place" -> this makes me like oscar even more... he's not obnoxious but he likes to react. actually i found that clip of him discussing the jetpack incident (in which he knew they were filming him and so he had to react visibly for that reason) quite interesting. he seems like a very observant and intentional person in a lot of ways WHICH MAKES THE HEART EYES SYNDROME EVEN MORE QUESTIONABLE.
"but when you look at their qualities it kind of seems as though he and lando look very similar on paper and that a lot of what made oscar successful in f2 (great one-lap pace + sheer adaptability + knowing when to take risks) are all things lando is lauded for" -> this is soooo interesting because although it's quite common to hear speculation of team lineup strategy in terms of having a #1 and a #2, or not, it's rarer for someone to say "i think they chose to pair these two drivers because their skills are compatible or their strengths are identical". i do wonder if they got lucky or if they're geniuses a little bit. how much did oscar and lando contribute to the success of their development, either in feedback or execution, etc. yeah you can say everything lined up this season for oscar and lando to be able to do well, but they still have to deliver as drivers and i think the "total package" that mclaren is right now being this strong is so promising for 2024 and beyond...
"There is no external noise in his brain. He doesn’t dissipate or dilute his talent into things that are not useful or functional, and that was apparent to us relatively early on." andrea stella banger quotes fr.... oscar is just some guy but he's just some guy in such an efficient way we'll see how that helps him as his career goes on.
telemetry will probably always go over my head so i can't comment on the full content of the post but it's apparent how much objective data you take into consideration when analyzing oscar and it makes your praise of him so lovely to hear ♥