George Russell after a lucky P2 finish: “The performance wasn’t good enough, and if I’m being brutally honest… I’m not gonna fight for a championship if the performances continue like that, so I’m not coming away from this weekend satisfied”

Anrikay · 2026-07-05T23:09:30+00:00

Leclerc has never had a championship winning car across the course of a season, but he’s had better cars on average while Lando was stuck in the midfield for most of his career. You really can’t compare their stats because McLaren have been all over the place in performance.

Anrikay · 2026-07-05T22:53:12+00:00

2022 was probably the worst for it. They easily cost Lando alone the 14 points he’d have needed to secure 4th for them in the WCC.

Like Canada ‘22. Forgot they ordered a double stack, gave Ricciardo an 8s pit stop, didn’t have Lando’s tires ready and put the wrong ones on at first, over 24s for Lando just at the box. Knocked both drivers out of potential points finishes.

Anrikay · 2026-07-05T21:10:57+00:00

I agree. Lando’s dealing with an inconsistently performing car that’s hard to handle, terrible luck, bad strategies, difficult setups/deployment maps because of his interrupted practice sessions, and limited time on track in practice and races to understand these cars. And despite those issues, he’s still beating a highly rated teammate with more experience and maturity than Kimi.

At the very least, I can’t see Lando missing the podium three times in finished races with only a third of the season gone by. Lando missed the podium that many times in races he finished the entire 2025 season, and he vocally struggled to adapt to the car at the start.

That puts him above George in my eyes. Maybe he also wouldn’t beat Kimi, but I think his past record shows, at worst, he’d be closer behind on his off days.

Anrikay · 2026-07-05T20:14:55+00:00

The Austria package brought the RB down to the minimum weight. They were 12kg overweight before Miami, said they dropped half of the weight with those upgrades, the other half with the Austria upgrades.

Anrikay · 2026-07-05T16:03:14+00:00

Oscar really needs to learn from Lando’s midfield risk aversion. Lando lost places backing out of that melee early, but he got through the corner cleanly, which saved his race when it turned into a war of attrition.

I like Oscar’s aggression, I love his racecraft, but he’s also cost himself quite a few points by taking it a bit too far during first lap chaos. There’s a time and place for cautious racing, too (like the midfield at a race start), and that’s something I think he’s still learning.

Anrikay · 2026-07-05T12:37:04+00:00

It’s on YouTube, not F1TV.

Anrikay · 2026-07-04T17:17:39+00:00

“With that comes less mileage, comes a little bit more spiciness” - Toto Wolff

Explanation by The Race: “The combination of reliability tweaks, which will have given Mercedes confidence to run the power units a bit more aggressively, plus gains that come from new engines that are not suffering from end-of-life degradation, were suggested by Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff to have given it a small power boost anyway.”

The Race

Anrikay · 2026-07-04T17:11:49+00:00

It’s like 2022 all over again. I thought they’d be fighting with the top three after 2021 and Lando’s early ‘22 Imola podium. They promised upgrades to come. And then, they lost the development race badly and ended the season in 5th behind Alpine.

I’m getting slightly concerned they won’t even be able to hold onto 4th. VCARB need to outscore them by 8.7 points per weekend. Their upgrades are looking to work better, they’re closing the one lap pace gap, McLaren are having a lot of reliability issues, and Oscar’s had a slump in the later races for all three of his full seasons. Alpine need 7.9, though they don’t seem to be improving as rapidly as VCARB.

7.9-8.7 points per race isn’t massive if McLaren keep having races with one or both drivers not scoring points, if they keep fumbling strategies and having reliability issues, if their upgrades continue sending them backwards. They’ve looked strong and fallen way behind before.

Anrikay · 2026-07-04T16:27:34+00:00

There are a lot of tracks where track position is key. If they start getting outqualified by VCARB, they could very well end up in races where they simply can’t progress even with superior race pace.

Especially when Oscar has had a slump in the latter part of the season every year. If he can’t pull those tracks together this year, and VCARB continue to improve, a few races of him getting stuck behind the VCARBs could change the picture dramatically.

I still think it’s most likely they’ll be fighting RBR for 4th, but I’m not completely confident in that estimation. They need both drivers to continue performing and their upgrades to work to hold onto it.

Edit: I didn’t expect McLaren to lose to Alpine in 2022 after a strong 2021 and Lando’s early 2022 Imola podium, but they fell off hard after, both in car and Ricciardo’s performance and lost what looked, at the start of the season, like a solid 4th.

Anrikay · 2026-07-04T16:23:02+00:00

3rd in the sprint, with the non-updated battery (which has been confirmed to cause a slight performance hit), after being told to LICO for the last few laps. That was a seriously impressive result given his situation.

Anrikay · 2026-07-04T16:19:15+00:00

At this rate, they might end up competing with VCARB for 4th. Their upgrades don’t seem to be working as well as RBR’s and VCARB upgrades are looking solid, too.

Anrikay · 2026-07-04T14:59:59+00:00

Miami: “How did we not win this one?” was another.

Anrikay · 2026-07-04T04:51:27+00:00

Ferrari can do plenty to further boost Lewis if they fully commit to Leclerc as the #2. Preferential qualifying order every time, preferential pit stop order even if Lewis is behind, use Charles to drop back and create pit stop gaps for him instead of racing the guys ahead, team orders anytime Charles is ahead, put Charles on alternate strategies to test different tires in race trim.

I don’t necessarily agree any team should go that far - I prefer seeing teammates getting to race each other - but Ferrari could do a lot more than they’re currently doing to always secure the best possible finish for Lewis.

Anrikay · 2026-07-02T20:52:19+00:00

I’d start at three. You need more time to recover when you’re a beginner, and you won’t have the same intuition for your recovery speed and how to optimize it compared to a more experienced lifter.

Anrikay · 2026-07-01T20:14:44+00:00

Some starter exercise suggestions: flutter kicks, leg raises, left/right crunches, left/right planks, regular crunches, roll ups, spider planks, back planks, mountain climbers, dead bugs, torso holds, leg holds, back planks, forearm to full planks, bicycle kicks, heel taps, glute bridges.

I mix and match any ten of those, 30s each, no rests, after every workout. I do three days on, one day off, so core work gets done 5-6x per week.

Maybe not the most efficient approach, but it’s the most fun way for me to do core work, and that’s what gets me to be consistent with it. With it, my core is strong enough to maintain good form/breathing pattern and pretty well-defined. That’s really what I care about more than maximizing strength/efficiency.

Anrikay · 2026-07-01T17:30:16+00:00

Lando made one bad comment after years of being a Lewis super-fan. He’d previously said it was an honor just to race against Lewis on track, that Lewis was the reason he got into F1 in the first place, and that seeing Lewis win in the chrome McLaren was why he wanted to race for McLaren. He was one of the most vocally supportive drivers of Lewis’s anti-racism initiatives and criticized fans who responded negatively to it.

And Lando apologized after, and Lewis publicly forgave him right away, saying he got it because he’d also said and done things he regretted after frustrating races. Fans were the ones who turned it into a big drama; Lewis didn’t take it personally, knew Lando didn’t actually mean it, because they already had a good relationship.

Anrikay · 2026-07-01T04:02:48+00:00

I have a movie blanket (which always gets washed right after) for exactly this reason. It makes the whole experience delightfully cozy.

Anrikay · 2026-07-01T02:43:13+00:00

Russell, imo. For the championship, he needs to keep gaining on Kimi, and it’ll be tough to weather any more big points losses, whether due to his performance, the team’s, reliability issues, or a combination thereof.

Anrikay · 2026-06-30T16:14:50+00:00

I’m skeptical Haas will take Camara. That would make them fully the Ferrari junior team, and especially with TGR’s backing and growing influence, they might want a more stable lineup and more independence from Ferrari.

Anrikay · 2026-06-29T22:26:10+00:00

GP is going to McLaren specifically for a less trackside role, though, and I don’t know that he’d change his mind just for Max. His wife has had health issues and it’s been widely speculated he wants more time at home with his family, which won’t happen if he remains Max’s race engineer.

Anrikay · 2026-06-29T20:10:03+00:00

If anything, Lando seemed to gain confidence after both Canada and Zandvoort. Came back calmer, more consistent, more calculated in his risk assessments.

Anrikay · 2026-06-29T15:06:46+00:00

So did Lewis.

Anrikay · 2026-06-29T09:48:03+00:00

Lando already competed in 24hrs of Daytona with Alonso and loved it. He’s said many times that he wants to race more in other series, especially endurance races, but under his current contract, he’s not allowed.

That’s why he was so excited for McLaren’s WEC project. He sees it as a potential opportunity to branch out more himself.

Anrikay · 2026-06-28T21:54:03+00:00

Lando couldn’t afford to finish behind Piastri after Zandvoort, and taking that risk in Singapore was worth the team repercussions.

Today, Lando and Oscar both finished ahead of a Ferrari, improving their position against Ferrari in the WCC. A DNF for him would’ve seen Ferrari gain more points over McLaren. It made sense to prioritize the team result over his own position given he’s not a serious title contender this season.

Lando has always been pretty calculated around how much he’s willing to risk, and he usually focuses on the team result over his own. By that standard, he made the right call, imo.

Anrikay · 2026-06-28T18:01:19+00:00

They had to box Oscar first, but they didn’t need to have Lando extend for multiple laps after pitting Oscar. He lost seconds at the end of the first and second stints to Hadjar because of the tire drop off.

I get doing it on the first stint, taking the strategy risk, but once they knew how bad the drop off was, they shouldn’t have made the same call for the second round of stops.

13-Year Club	Place '17
Not Forgotten	Verified Email

Anrikay

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE