FYI, yes I heard that in the Fran Fine voice 😂

Nah man, you're doing fine. Distinguished. Most of my mates had greying beard in their early thirties (except Biz, still not a grey anywhere on his head. bitch 😂)

See, I'm of the opinion that I look pretty good for someone wh's forty in a couple of months. Biz, however, still gets mistaken for a dude in his 20s. Bitch.

However, a judge in the French courts has ruled that irregularities raised should be further examined and a hearing has been scheduled for 16th February 2026. #F1

We never got to see what he could achieve in the Red Bull, sure, but I think overall he would have been a solid choice from a car preference standpoint — more in line with Max and thus more useful overall from a development perspective. Yeah, he would have been a seatwarmer, but one with a purpose

and b) then only really having one year broken up into 1/2 seasons in a car that started out pretty terrible and was then developed to a point — predominantly with HIS input — to one that could consistently get into the top 10 (while being a mentor to Yuki along the way)

Sure, Daniel didn't appear to get on with the current generation of car, however that impression is significantly influenced by a) the McLaren having strange brake characteristics that didn't suit his preferred cornering style and confidence he could lean on them when overtaking

I still think that he was the only correct choice for the second seat next to Max last year/this year, and the moment they decided to do what they did to him last year in Singapore, they should have just stuck with Checo for the 26 car dev input. I find what they're doing incredibly shortsighted

I was only winding back the clock as far as Max's being the last internal promotion that stuck, or I would have ended up with a thread as long as my arm 🫠

WRT DR, while I think yeah maybe leaving Red Bull was a mistake driven by ego (and bad advice), I think the biggest one was leaving Renault

They're only going to be satisfied when they have the Next Generational Talent to replace the Current Generational Talent when he decides to retire and go racing those GT cars part time. How many young drivers need to be chewed up and spat out in a few months before they find another unicorn?

Dont get me wrong, I'm a huge Max fan. But this is part of my point

The cycle is: Junior shows promise in different team in different car with diferent more benign characteristics, gets promoted, fails to live up to Acknowledged Generational Talent Max Verstappen, gets put out to pasture or demoted

No, Formula 1 isn't a finishing school, but RB/AT/TR/ kind of IS and it hasn't succeeded in its original purpose for going on ten years. Gasly, Albon, and Sainz eventually made their way to other teams but the last internal promotion success story was Max Verstappen back in 2016

The nearer we get to the end of Max's current contract the clearer it becomes that Red Bull is scrambling around trying to find a potential homegrown replacement, and just tossing anyone aside who doesnt hit the ground running, despite not TRULY preparing these guys for how tough that challenge is

Tangential to this, I think as well that were Lewis Hamilton not a 7 time world champ and instead someone who never had the car to win championships, we would be talking about him in exactly the same way as Daniel Ricciardo in 2022. As a huge fan of both, that's an uncomfortable thing to think about

Anyway TL:DR there were a lot of people out there who liked to complain and conspiracy theorise about the amount of influence Sainz reportedly had on car development, and yet here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At least it's not as bad as 2020, I guess?

And sure, it's all hypotheticals, but I think to say 'Carlos must be glad he's not in that dogshit red lawnmower' also has to come with a heavy dose of 'Would that car even be the same thing if they weren't thinking about a different person being in one of the seats'

If Ferrari had retained the same driver line up, when they had a car that came within a few points of winning the constructors' championship the previous season that BOTH drivers were able to get performance out of (mostly), changing to this degree would be a bizarre choice

So you have to ask the question - if Sainz HAD been involved in the 2025 car development, if he were one of the drivers the engineers and designers were considering when analysing the inherent characteristics as per the CFD/ATR/Sim data, would Ferrari have put a completely different car on track?